Great Dixter - October

In September, I put up the first of a monthly series of photographs of Great Dixter. Now here are some from yesterday - a perfect Autumn day spent at possibly one of my most favourite places. There was a slight breeze too, and it was beautiful how the plants moved in the wind. A real living garden.

The Salway Estate

So it's the week of Chelsea Flower Show, and all the great and the good seem to be opening their palatial doors wide to reveal their gardens. This is my sore spot. I gave up a really well-loved vegetable patch in Edinburgh, when we moved down South. Now I have a patch of concrete instead. For three years, I kept up an allotment but had to give it up this year because of a mixture of time and bad back. However, all is not lost... I am trying positive thinking to make me love my concrete. First up is my portable vegetable garden - some time over the summer, I want to have grown my own ratatouille (first having found out how to spell it)...



The other spoilt fat-girl Salway now has her own spot of lawn, thanks to buying a piece of turf at £3.79 at the local garden centre. And she thinks it very nice to lie on it in the sun ...


I'm even starting to see some results ...



And because every gardener needs something to make them happy ...



Gold medals all round, I think!

And one day after...

... the earthquake, it's hard to imagine anything so violent happened here in Kent. We took the day off to visit the garden at Great Dixter.

It was a perfect English Spring day, and a perfect English House:



There was colour in abundance



But, as always, it was potential that proved more interesting



Even the trees seemed to tell a story of ease and everything fitting together



And just when it couldn't get better, we came across the dog!