English gardens are a lot like buses. Especially the number 10–from Hammersmith to King’s Cross–during the current roadworks in Knightsbridge. Continue reading
Category: Garden Reviews
Brooklyn Botanic Garden, New York
Designed places need four characteristics to ensure we enjoy them: mystery, complexity, coherence and legibility. So say Rachel and Steven Kaplan, in their book, Experience of Nature: A Psychological Perspective, which draws on research-based analysis to understand which types of natural environments people prefer. This concept was just part of a fascinating article by Harry Wade that I stumbled across whilst researching the natural vegetation of New York. Continue reading
Chanticleer: “A Gardener’s Garden”
As we were warmly greeted, on a slightly wet and chilly October day (and I was offered free entry as a garden designer – woohoo!), the lady at Chanticleer’s reception kindly proceeded to describe to us the key features of the garden. Continue reading
A journey of the High Line planting
To console myself for no longer being able to pop out to the High Line for my thrice weekly walk, I thought I’d produce a virtual version, from the Meatpacking District in the South to the Rail Yards of the North, highlighting the various planting styles along the way. Continue reading
The High Line, New York
I recently read a definition of ‘sense of place’ as somewhere that draws you back time and time again. And so despite staying on the other side of Manhattan during my recent trip to New York – and having an impossibly long list of things I wanted to see and do – my three excursions to the High Line in the space of one week perhaps qualify this urban space as being pretty place-sensical. (Please remind me not to use that expression in my dissertation.) Continue reading
Trentham Gardens
I think, after Broughton Grange, we were all fairly unanimously agreed that Tom Stuart-Smith was a bona fide genius. But just in case you have any remote, lingering doubt, I bring you…(drum roll)…Trentham Gardens. Continue reading
Ascott House and Gardens
I’ve been doing quite a bit of soul-searching over the six months we’ve been back in the UK. Well, perhaps soul-searching is a little overly dramatic, but just trying to work out how we want to live this next chapter of our lives.
Do we live in central London, so it’s convenient for Paul’s work and all the activities this amazing city has to offer? Or do I need more trees? And if we get a house outside London, where do we go and what do we look for? We really have too many options available. Continue reading
The Beth Chatto Gardens
“The site was wasteland, a wilderness lying between our farm and our neighbours. It consisted of a long spring-fed hollow where the soil lay black and waterlogged, surrounded by sun-baked gravel…in one of the driest parts of the country. But it was the extreme variation in growing conditions which intrigued us, the possibility lying before us of growing…plants adapted by nature to different situations.” Beth Chatto Continue reading
Tom Stuart-Smith’s Broughton Grange
It is possible to be winded by a garden? For a place to feel so ‘breath-taking’ your body actually shuts down for a second or two? Continue reading
Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park Gardens
I’ve been to the Olympics! Admittedly, four years late.
We seem to have made a habit of missing them, arriving in Beijing – from our then home of Kuala Lumpur – to miss the 2008 Olympics by a matter of days, living on completely the wrong side of the world in 2012 and then leaving the Southern Hemisphere just as the Olympics arrived there this year.
And having not yet bought a TV in London it’s even a challenge to follow from afar, so instead, Paul and I ventured over to Stratford to try and find some Olympic-magic there. Continue reading
Janna Schreier Garden Design 