The Dillon Garden 2003/4/5

A blast from the past: photographs of visits to Helen and Val Dillon's garden in 2003/4/5, came up unexpectedly today. A publication has asked me for photographs of another garden and the search took me to an old external hard drive with photographs dating back to my first digital camera. Browsing such collections inevitably leads …

The Great Escape!

Of course, I have been dramatic with the title but there are occasions when small interludes can feel like just that, a great escape. We had days of the most miserable weather; days when we not only had incessant rain but rain accompanied by bitingly cold wind. There were days of being confined to the …

The Excluding Eye – A Visit to The Garden House, Devon.

Why do we seek beauty and prettiness and exclude the unappealing, distasteful or unattractive when we photograph a garden? I have just looked back over an album of shots from a visit to The Garden House in Devon and find the photographs strongly contradict my thoughts and impressions of the garden on the day. They …

Mount Usher

Mount Usher, in Ashford, Co. Wicklow is one of my favourite gardens and, indeed, it has regularly polled as one of Ireland's top visitor attractions and has often been described as Ireland's most romantic garden. It is very much an Irish garden, a garden of softness and naturalness, a garden which lies at ease in …

Marwood Hill Garden

On retirement, my late friend, John Riley, spend some time in Devon before moving to Ireland. John was an East-End boy, of Irish parentage, and there were regular recollections of his evacuation during the Second World War, of summers with his mother hop-picking in Kent, of his days in the Posts and Telegraphs, of fishing …

Killerton House

The Ackland family purchased the Killerton estate (2,590 hectares/6,400 acres) in the early 1600s and passed it to the National Trust in 1944. On visiting today, one sees an extensive designed landscape with a comparatively small ornamental garden close to the house. It was John Veitch, of the famous Veitch Nursery family, who laid out …

The National Botanic Gardens of Wales

There is a tremendous sense of space, of openness, of great skies and distant views at the National Botanic Gardens of Wales. Shortly after entering the gardens one comes to a circular pond with fountain, fed by a meandering rill which has run downhill for over 100 metres. The temptation is to follow the rill …