the running wave

While I was staying with cousins in North Yorkshire we visited Beningborough Hall.  It's a grand house, with a lovely walled garden.  They have an impressive vegetable garden within the walls, and a long, colourful border on the outside.  September is a great month for vivid colour in the garden. Apart from catching up with family and friends, my trip down south was built around a two day event organised by gardener and wonderful flower lady, Sarah Raven.  We were to visit Sissinghurst Castle, Great Dixter and her own garden, Perch Hill.  All these gardens are within a few miles of each other, on the East Sussex and Kent border.   On my way to check in to my B&B in Battle, I visited Charleston Farmhouse, not far from Lewes.  I have been there twice before.  The first time I visited was in 1986, when the house first opened to the public.  It's all changed a bit since then.  Much more geared towards visitors, a shop...

After breakfast this morning, Tilly and I put our best feet forward to check out a few favourite haunts.  We started with the barley field, now harvested and tidied away.   All the bales of barley straw are lined up at the edge of the field, looking a little like a school photograph, at the end of the summer term. The saplings planted near the shepherd's hut are all thriving,   and this red admiral butterfly was enjoying the blackberry bushes as much as I was.  I love blackberrying, and the ones I picked today were particularly flavoursome.  I was a bit surprised that no-one else seems to have been picking the berries.  There were no telltale patches of flattened grass in front of the brambles!  Perhaps, these days, it's easier to grab a punnet of supersized blackberries from the chiller in Tesco.  They are missing the flavour of the wild, though! Earlier in the year I made a mental note to go back to a patch of white hones...

Yesterday, the walking group rambled in a great big circle.  We started from the middle of Gullane, up and over a hill to a beach, along the coast a little way, heading back towards Edinburgh, through part of the Aberlady Reserve (where I help with the plant survey in July), passed Luffness Golf Club, and back to the car.  In the sea, there were lots of eider duck, and standing in a gaggle on the rocks beyond, about twenty cormorants.  You can see the hills of Fife on the far side of the Firth of Forth. It is always a joy to me that, in East Lothian, a walk can take you to places with a great sense of remoteness, and yet Edinburgh is only about twenty miles away. I love sea buckthorn, Hippophae rhamnoides .  At the moment it is at its most beautiful.  The orange berries are a wonderful colour, set against its soft grey foliage.  The berries are not easy to gather, very squishy when you try and remove them from the branch, but they can...

I've been gadding around England over the past week, visiting gardens as though they were going out of fashion!  I've taken over 900 photographs, so now that I am home, I need to trawl through them to find the ones I like best.  Most will be binned!  There will be more of my grand tour over the next few days. In the meantime, it's that time of year when humongous spiders come out of the woodwork and scuttle across the floor, lurk on the ceilings, and leap out from the folds in the curtains.  I brushed one off my shoulder in the middle of the night last night - sent it flying across the room, and it's not the first time I have done that in the last few weeks!  Everyone in this household is ridiculously scared of them.  Mr Gaucho grew up in the Argentine, so I suppose I can be a little forgiving of his dislike of any sized spider, because over there they are probably poisonous.  The great big things we are sharing our home with at the moment are known...

The Dutch garden designer, Piet Oudolph, is my garden hero.  I love his work, and have mentioned that here before, several times.  I had no idea that one of his gardens was just up the road from where I was spending the weekend.  With my excitement mounting on Sunday morning, we went to visit the gardens at Scampston Hall, where, in 1999, Oudolph began to lay out his design for the Walled Garden.  Planting was completed in 2003. It was a magical visit.  I still can't believe I have been in amongst all that delicious planting - waving grasses, dreamy drifts of early autumn colour.  The combination of textures - mixing and matching, contrasting.  It's genius.  Apart from a fabulous array of ethereal grasses, moving gracefully in the wind, seed heads are a particular feature of Oudolph's planting plans.  They have been considered and placed to provide beauty throughout the winter months, when they become frosted and skeletal, and continue to b...