July Holiday 1997 - 1

I've found another old Moosey journal in the garage, which dates from 1997. It describes my travels around parts of England in the middle of 1997.

English Gardening Summer

It's the English gardening summer, and I'm zooming around visiting open gardens, navigating from e.g. Oxford to Devon via the scenic B-roads. Non-Gardening Partner starts off with me, but doesn't last the garden-visiting distance!

But I'm not taking my garden reporting seriously. Some gardens are simply written up as 'OK' while others like The Old Vicarage in Norfolk are embarrassingly dismissed, deemed unworthy of using up any film in the ancient Moosey camera!

And all the time I'm missing my own garden back home... Anyway, I'll skip the details of the long flights over and get straight to the first garden visiting day

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Sunday 6th July

We are staying just out of Cambridge in a village called Cottenham. I've never been in this area of England before. It's great to see summer gardens - hollyhocks growing in cracks by the pavement, window boxes full of flower colour... I've even seen a couple of Cordylines, and lots and lots of yellow Corydalis. Cottenham is full of planning permission notices, with homeowners wanting to build extensions. Hmm...

Garden Visiting

Hee hee. I've started my garden visiting and just seen the tallest Delphiniums in the world - they live in the perennial borders at Anglesey Abbey. And the ugliest and saddest dahlia bed, whose edge is covered with chicken netting - to keep visitors off? Rabbits? Not deer in England, surely... Nice concrete monsters, though...

Monday 7th July

Today we went to Diss via Thetford. Our first stop was Bressingham's nursery and the famous dell garden of Alan Bloom. Wow. It was inspiring. The Island Beds were all numbered and they were brilliantly crammed full of perennials. I only saw two roses. The terrain was gently lumpy, so at times you couldn't see the grass in between. I liked the garden. I can't 'do' hummocky plantings - I always put plants far too close together. And of course I couldn't buy anything at the plant nursery...

Tuesday 8th July

Our first garden visit today was to Peter Beales' rose nursery and display garden at Attleborough. It was really nice. I liked the rose Corylus - saw a few bushes of it. More details are definitely required.

There was an enormous Fritz Nobis with stems as fat as my ankles. I saw Agnes the lemon rugosa, but oh dear - she looked really scruffy. Naturally a lot of the low arching roses had wires to support them. I bought a glossy rose catalogue - light bedtime reading...