Garden Tour – Pashley Manor

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Great Dixter, Pashley Manor, scented roses, Sissinghurst Castle

Pashley Manor – entrance into the walled garden

The first stop on our recent garden tour of Kent and Sussex was at Pashley Manor. It’s a garden that came highly recommended by two fellow students on a garden design course I did several years ago. I didn’t really know anything about the garden and had never seen anything on TV or in magazines about it, unlike Sissinghurst and Great Dixter, that we would visit later in the week.

After spending several hours there I have no idea why Pashley Manor doesn’t receive more attention. Maybe because its location on the Sussex/Kent border, two counties with a surfeit of stunning gardens to visit, means that other more famous gardens gain more recognition.

The gardens are quintessentially English, surrounding a Grade I listed house that dates back to the 16th century. Think scented roses, herbaceous borders, espaliered fruit trees and a potager kitchen garden. When the owners moved to Pashley in the 1980s the gardens were out of control. There were remnants of past lives; the mature trees, rhododendrons planted during the Victorian period, an overgrown walled garden with tumble down glasshouses and weeds everywhere. The owners worked with a landscape gardener, Anthony du Gard Pasley, to establish the structure and bones of the garden and the initial planting schemes in the 1990s and since then a team of gardeners have maintained and added to the gardens to create a very special place.

The formal gardens cover some 11 acres where they then blend into the rolling countryside. The main planting is concentrated close to the house, with a series of ‘garden rooms’ within the old garden walls. The kitchen garden makes use of these walls to good effect, with the extra shelter and residual heat from the bricks creating a micro climate. Trained fruit trees grow along the walls and standard gooseberries create lovely shapes and structure. The potager is divided from the rest of the garden by an avenue of pleached pear trees underplanted with the gorgeous pink rose, ‘Irene Watts’, and white foxgloves.

Pleached pear trees underplanted with roses and foxgloves

From here you can walk into the formal rose garden. I’m not normally a fan of rose gardens. I’ve seen too many with straggly, sickly looking roses covered in black spot and the occasional flower and not much else, but Pashley Manor’s rose garden is nothing like this. The rose beds are neatly edged with box hedges and down the central path a mass of frothy Saxifraga urbium tumbles onto the grass path. I’ve never seen saxifrage used in this way before and it is stunning. The roses are healthy and blooming profusely but most importantly they smell divine. With the beautiful house in the background this is the kind of garden I conjure up in my dreams.

Frothy Saxifraga umbrium lining the edges of the rose garden

The area around the swimming pool is a real sun trap and has a Mediterranean feel to it, with cistus and dianthus baking in the sun in the raised beds. Leading off the pool is a Victorian greenhouse, filled with streptocarpus, cobaea and passion flowers.

The herbaceous borders

Outside the brick boundaries are herbaceous borders planted to provide interest throughout the seasons. On our visit they had a dark, smoky feel to them with the purple of cotinus, dark red alstroemeria, and the scarlet flowers of Rosa moyesii ‘Geranium’. From here paths lead to several large ponds which are fed by natural springs.  This area is densely packed with shade and moisture loving plants.

‘Lazy Days’ sculpture in the rose garden

Sculpture plays an important part in the gardens at Pashley Manor with annual exhibitions throughout the gardens. Wellyman was particularly taken by this girl sat on the bench and spent quite a lot of time taking photos of her. He wasn’t quite so keen on the price tag of £5000 though, even if it did include the bench!

On one side of the house, with views across the lawn to the ponds, is a cafe and terrace. Although we’d already eaten the food looked good, using produce from the kitchen garden.

Beautiful alstroemeria

There are some beautiful specimen trees and shrubs dotted throughout the gardens and with new projects planned for forthcoming years to open up new areas this is definitely a garden worth a visit.

For more information on Pashley Manor and the events they hold throughout the year take a look at their website www.pashleymanorgardens.com.

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Getting Back

Tags

Derek Jarman, Great Dixter, Pashley Manor, Perch Hill, Sarah Raven, Sissinghurst Castle

Great Dixter Oast Houses

A feeling of trepidation always accompanies a return from holiday. Wellyman worries whether the house will still be standing, I, on the other hand wonder what state the garden and allotment will be in. We have just come back from a week in East Sussex and, miraculously, bearing in mind what a shocking summer this is turning out to be, had good weather and the only rain was at night. It appears the south-east of Wales hasn’t faired so well if the height of the River Wye is anything to go by. As we drove past it on our return its churning, chocolately brown water flowing rapidly downstream told us there had been a lot of rain and the unseasonal strong and gusty winds made me wonder how the plants had coped.

Stunning poppy at Pashley Manor

It is incredible the difference a week can make and certainly all the rain has meant the garden looks incredibly lush. Those plants not reliant on warmth are growing at a pace, those hoping for something warmer are looking positively weedy in comparison. It’s on days like today that I love the fact we have no lawn. I hated being greeted by the foot high grass that made the garden that looked lovingly tendered before the holiday look like something the local farmer would like to get his hands on when we returned. There’s nothing like returning from holiday and suddenly feeling overwhelmed by the chores that will need to be done, at least lawn mowing is one less task for the Welly household.

Sissinghurst and the white garden

After a much needed cup of tea, some unpacking and food we wandered up to the plot. Considering the buffeting it is taking it is looking remarkably good. There’ll be bucket loads of flowers to pick tomorrow, plenty of strawberries and our first broad beans and peas. Some annual asters don’t look well and the topsy-turvy weather means I might have a gap of several weeks with few flowers, whilst I wait for the later flowering plants to bloom. The broad beans, peas and climbing beans have all struggled with the wind. My plot is quite exposed to the prevailing south-westerly wind and it is quite a challenge to keep everything upright. The broad beans are certainly going to need some remedial staking work tomorrow. The courgettes are sulking, it really isn’t warm enough for them. Still, I feel I can breathe a sigh of relief now.

Derek Jarman’s Garden

For years now we had been saying we wanted to visit Sissinghurst Castle Gardens and Great Dixter and so this year we booked a week on the Sussex coast with the plan to tour the gardens of that county and its neighbour Kent and it’s from there that we’ve just returned. It turned into a bit of a garden fest with Pashley Manor, Perch Hill and Derek Jarman’s garden at Dungeness, along with several nurseries all visited in our whistle-stop trip. Often when you have wanted to visit much lauded places it is the unexpected that captures your imagination the most. There were many highs; roses at their best, beautiful wildflowers growing along the coast, my first sighting of a bee orchid, some gardening book bargain purchases and a few lows; the inability of visitor attractions to provide tasty, reasonably priced food and being bitten by some marauding insects that have certainly left their mark on my legs. I’ll post about the gardens we saw over the next week but for now there is a pile of washing waiting and an early night before a day on the plot, picking produce.