This time of year, we’re supposed to be looking forward to new shoots bursting through the soil, to spring, bringing hope and warmth and better times. Yet this morning, while looking for photographs of something else, I found images of my garden from 2018 which reminded me of garden losses I thought I had dealt…
Category: Lost Gardens
Foxgloves at Warley Place
Most people will tell you to see Warley in March. It’s true that Ellen Willmott directed most of her efforts at creating a daffodil explosion of yellows, creams, whites and oranges for March, and they still glow in the early spring sunshine. A few will suggest going earlier, in February, when the place is a…
It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year
…at Warley Place, anyway. Most people love Warley for its drifts of daffodils. After all, Daffs mean Prizes – Miss Willmott won RHS medals a-go-go for hers. She even boobytrapped the best ones and carried a revolver in her handbag against bulb thieves. There must still be a few prize specimens in there, it’s a…
A Year at Warley Part V: Things that just fetch up…
Garden archaeology doesn’t come much more exciting than finding something pretty much every time you dig. I’ve been visiting Warley Place for thirty-odd years and every time I go something new has been uncovered by the dedicated team of volunteers. Sometimes it’s a bit of brick wall, sometimes a cobbled path. It might be yet…
A Year at Warley Place, Part IV: Daffodils
Miss Willmott had a thing for daffs. No, really, she was crazy about them. On joining the male-dominated Royal Horticultural Society she promptly invaded the all-male Narcissus Committee and won gold medals in four consecutive years. Warley Place would have been sunshine-yellow with prize hybrids, named for her sister and brother in law, and a much-missed sister…
Painshill, Pride of Surrey
Painshill Park Landscape Garden in Cobham, Surrey, is an 18th Century fantasy of gothic follies, Arcadian vistas, woodland dells and mysterious grottoes, yet by the mid-20th Century it had crumbled to invisibility. Estate Manager Mark Ebdon, who began work 33 years ago as a trainee, still remembers his first day. “It was just woodland,” he…
A Year at Warley Place, Pt III: The Ruins
Part three in my year’s exploration of the extraordinary ruined garden at Warley Place, Brentwood, Essex, looks at what’s left of the house and spectacular gardens. Last time saw a potted history of how Edwardian Plantswoman Ellen Willmott’s cossetted baby became so very ruined and overgrown. This time we’ll take a quick hike around what a…
A Year at Warley Place Pt. II: The Story
Warley Place, one of the most exciting gardens of early 20th Century England, has been a ruin since World War II. Ellen Willmott, doyenne of the Edwardian gardening scene, was right up there with Gertrude Jekyll (literally, she and Jekyll were the only two women to receive the RHS’s inaugural Victoria Medal in 1897) but for…
A Year at Warley Place, Part I: Snowdrops
I have often written about my love for Warley Place, the once-famous garden of Edwardian plantswoman Ellen Willmott. The Essex garden, visited by royalty and bigwigs of the gardening world, was lost before the second world war, but was rescued in the nick of time and is now maintained by volunteers as a stunningly gorgeous wildlife…
You keep a-knockin’…
…but you can’t come in… A few months ago I talked about the fantastic once-lost Plantation Garden in Norwich, a piece first featured in the Telegraph. It’s a wonderful, mysterious corner, once hacked out of an old quarry by an eccentric Victorian tycoon, then lost, then hacked out of jungle by an army of volunteers who still…
Avery Hill Winter Garden
Avery Hill Park, Eltham, Kent. ‘Colonel’ John Thomas North was desperate to leave his humble beginnings behind. He was even keener to leave behind the story of how he made his fortune – selling South American bird droppings as fertiliser. Victorian head gardeners across the country may have been grateful to the Nitrate King but…
The Event Gardener 