On Monday I went to Great Dixter to do a day’s gardening course, specifically: “Preparing Your Border For Spring & Summer.” The day was given to me as a Christmas present and what a great present it turned out to be. I love Great Dixter. I love the house (see the March issue of World of Interiors. It’s on the cover), I love the books, I love the nursery, I love the shop and I really, really love the gardens. And now I love the head gardener, Fergus Garrett, too. He is film star handsome and charismatic and totally single minded. A proper obsessive. Plus, as he reels off plant names, it’s as if he speaks fluent latin. Sigh.
These pots, just inside the front door, are the first thing you see when you go into the house. The trilium in the left hand corner is a wonderful plant.
Here it is in close up.
Loving these tiny tulips. They are called Tulip Humilis Lilliput.
I learnt lots of things about how to make my own borders better. No, in fact, what I really learnt was that I should start again with my borders which look bare and brown and desolate in comparison to Great Dixter’s complicated and multi-layered planting schemes. I can’t believe I haven’t spread out my forget-me-knot and honesty self-sown seedlings. And what was I thinking planting tens of muscari and fritillaria? I need hundreds of them. I also need to work on my garden full time and I need staff, students and interns.
This is a banana plant in the Exotic Garden in its winter coat. Someone spent a cold day making this coat for the banana. Can you imagine how much work it is to over-winter every tender plant at Great Dixter.
It’s really inspiring how they pick out pockets of the garden for spring (and later summer) bedding. Talk about a swathe of bellis perennis.
Probably my favourite bit of the garden if I was having my head chopped off and had to choose. A meadow of daffodils and fritallaria.
