A different project took me last week to Somerset, a place overflowing with good gardens. As I'm never driving home it's never possible for me to visit the many outstanding nurseries frustatingly, though last time I visited East Lambrook Manor, one time home of Margery Fish, a gardening heroine of mine not least because she always gardened in a nice frock.
Anyway, this time I spent one of my evenings at a lecture by Mr Paul Atterley of Antiques Roadshow fame, on Arts & Crafts Homes and Gardens. All very interesting but the venue was even more impressive - Hestercombe Gardens, a turn of the century extravaganza, with a Victorian terrace leading to a vast sunken garden (pictured here).
I turned a rare moment of isolation in the garden to good use, when I realised that some of the critical dimensions of the lower terrace compared with many in our proposals for the Abbey Garden site. For example, just seen on the right, the raised terraces are about 2 metres high around this main terrace, the height of a landform / ampitheatre we have proposed. It felt right - neither intimidatingly high nor too halfhearted. The design is also similar in some ways to the triangulated Harvest Garden we have suggested getting underway in 2009.
