Pashley, Penshurst

by Sonia Feldman

After many years of refusing to learn even the names of plants, I took a big step in the other direction by agreeing to plan and then actually go on a tour of England’s great gardens with my mother. The following series gives an account of the four particularly glorious days of that trip during which we traveled through Kent, a region aptly named the Garden of England. Our tour took place at the end of May, and the descriptions of the gardens reflect that time of year. This is the third installment in the series. See the end of each article for a condensed itinerary of the entire tour.

Day Three: Visit Pashley Manor Gardens, lunch at one of the gardens or Thackeray’s Restaurant, visit Penshurst Place, dinner at The Wheatsheaf, stay at Hever Castle Bed & Breakfast.

Every winter, gardeners plant 30,0000 tulip bulbs in 108 varieties on the grounds of Pashley Manor. With the arrival of spring, the garden celebrates a magnificent yield. The annual Tulip Festival takes place during the last week of April and first week of May. Our visit to Pashley on the cusp of June found the garden in a moment of respite from its most magnificent seasons. Too late for the tulips and too soon for the upcoming Rose Week, the mood at the garden was serene.

Manicured paths move you between elegant garden rooms (kitchen, rose) and vistas of the property’s sweeping manicured lawns and large pond. A violent hurricane in 1987 killed over a thousand trees on the property but opened up excellent views over the estate’s rolling prospect, and indeed one of the primary pleasures of this garden is stopping to sit down on the various benches and admire the view.

Pashley as the advantage of being one house from the front and another from the back. The original Tudor structure still greets you on arrival, but as you work your way around the property, you’ll find the garden set against a Georgian addition at the back, which is now magnificently covered in purple wisteria. Centuries collide throughout the property. The house has history dating back to the 15^th century and evidence of gardening begins in the 16^th, but the property has also served as a family home to the present owners, the Sellick family, since 1981.

Signs of modern life coexist with traditional gardening at Pashley more so than at the other gardens on this tour. Among the garden rooms, you will find a turquoise swimming pool, likely being enjoyed by the ducks, and a small but definitely modern greenhouse. The elderly owner himself can be found wandering through the grounds in a frayed cashmere sweater, speaking to the gardeners about their work. In spite of his advancing age, Sellick continues to perform the necessary annual maintenance on the enormous wisteria that covers the back of the house himself, carefully winding its new branches around supportive wiring.

If you remain at Pashley for lunch, a pack of outgoing ducks is sure to ask for a bite. Otherwise, head on to Thackeray’s Restaurant, located in the town of Royal Tonbridge Wells and conveniently on the way to the next garden on the tour.

After lunch, continue to Penshurst Place, a historically significant 14^th century manor house with expansive gardens. Penshurst is one of the largest and most storied locations on the tour. The property belonged to two kings of England before eventually being granted to Sir William Sidney, father of the famous Elizabethan poet, soldier and courtier Sir Philip Sidney, and forebear to the property’s present owner, Viscount de L’Isle. This means that, remarkably, the Sidney family has been in continuous occupation of the property for more than 460 years.

With 11 acres of garden contributing to 48 total acres of grounds, Penshurst operates on a scale beyond what we’ve seen thus far on the tour. Walking the property feels more like visiting a park than a home. The garden does lack the strong sense of personality conveyed by places like Sissinghurst and Great Dixter, but Penshurst never comes across as stodgy or pretentious. Because the garden rooms are connected by doorways and passages often cleverly hidden from view by design of the neatly clipped yew hedges, the process of navigating from one to the next feels adventurous and playful.

The garden rooms vary greatly in size, some enormous, others intimate, and they manage to conceal an impressive variety of odd and charming features—a blue and yellow flower border after the colors of the Sidney family coat of arms, an enormous topiary bear and porcupine, the Stage Garden with a raised grass stage for children’s theater, a magical, bare bones wood gazebo crawling with green leaves and roses ready to burst and even an enormous Union flag made entirely of plants, which, surprisingly, isn’t nearly as garish as the idea suggests. But my favorite exploit of scale at Penshurst is the famous 100 meter peony border. Longer than a city block, this great line of peonies runs parallel to an equally long row of lilac bushes, all of them drooping heavily with blooming pink clusters and smelling like heaven.

If you are, in fact, faithfully following the details of this tour, you will breathe in all the lilacs you can and then drive to your new accommodations for the night. For reasons that will be explained (excitement builds) in the next article, those accommodations will be at Hever Castle. After you’ve checked in, head to dinner nearby at The Wheatsheaf.

Condensed tour itinerary:

Day One: Leave London, lunch at Langshott Manor, visit Nymans, dinner at The Milk House, retire at Cloth Hall Oast Bed & Breakfast or Sissinghurst Castle Farmhouse.

Day Two: Visit Great Dixter House and Gardens, lunch at one of the gardens or return to The Milk House, visit Sissinghurst Castle Gardens, dinner at Three Chimneys, retire to same lodgings.

Day Three: Visit Pashley Manor Gardens, lunch at one of the gardens or Thackeray’s Restaurant, visit Penshurst Place, dinner at The Wheatsheaf, stay at Hever Castle Bed & Breakfast.

Day Four: Visit Hever Castle Gardens, lunch at Beaverbrook, return to London.

Nearby gardens that could be added to this tour: Knole, RHS Wisley, Chartwell, Lullingstone Castle, Great Comp Garden, Scotney Castle, Wakehurst, Godinton.

Sonia Feldman is a writer living in Cleveland, Ohio. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Cultured Magazine, Pembroke Magazine and Juked. She operates an email newsletter, which sends one good poem a week. Find more of her work on Instagram.

Great Dixter, Sissinghurst

by Sonia Feldman

After many years of refusing to learn even the names of plants, I took a big step in the other direction by agreeing to plan and then actually go on a tour of England’s great gardens with my mother. The following series gives an account of the four particularly glorious days of that trip during which we traveled through Kent, a region aptly named the Garden of England. Our tour took place at the end of May, and the descriptions of the gardens reflect that time of year. This is the second installment in the series. See the end of each article for a condensed itinerary of the entire tour.

Day Two: Visit Great Dixter House and Gardens, lunch at one of the gardens or return to The Milk House, visit Sissinghurst Castle Gardens, dinner at Three Chimneys, retire to same lodgings.

There’s no need for strenuous early rising on this grand tour; none of these gardens open before 10am. Wake at your leisure, and then drive to Great Dixter. This famed Arts and Crafts style garden first came into renown under the ownership of Christopher Lloyd, a gardener and well known garden writer. He inherited the property from his father and wrote about the garden throughout his 50 year career as an author. He favored a dense, labor intensive approach to planting, and today every inch of the garden seems to have something living in it. A procession of garden rooms lead you through the property, and each has something to surprise.

Lloyd writes, “I have no segregated colour schemes. In fact, I take it as a challenge to combine every sort of colour effectively. I have a constant awareness of colour and of what I am doing, but if I think a yellow candelabrum of mullein will look good rising from the middle of a quilt of pink phlox, I’ll put it there – or let it put itself there. Many plants in this garden are self-sown and they often provide me with excellent ideas. But I do also have some of my own!”

This attitude is everywhere on display in Lloyd’s profuse and exuberantly colored plantings. See: fabulous highlighter pink poppies starred with pale purple marks at the center that appear first in a deliberate bed in the sunken garden and then pop up, one or two flowers at a time, throughout the rest of the garden.

Perhaps the most memorable aspect of Great Dixter is its dense but delicate wildflower fields. They must be waded through rather than walked. They blow softly in the wind, and though appearing like some sort of natural miracle, the famous wildflowers are in fact carefully cultivated by the gardening team. Native and introduced plants combine to create a lush floral carpet in several of the garden rooms, as well as in meadows that extend out from the property. The wildflowers are cut twice a year, in August and late autumn, only once the contents have completely ripened and shed their seeds.

It’s not uncommon for a garden to happen on the ground, and in visiting so many of these green spaces, you may find your eyes continually at your feet. Not so at Great Dixter. Rather than looking down at flowers in low beds, you will find that the garden happens at hip height or higher. In one particularly transporting room, the plants are as tall as the visitors, or taller. Many droop from above to meet your uplifted gaze. Foliage brushes against your waist, chest and shoulders. The garden envelops you. To me, Great Dixter felt like a dream, and I began to cry as we moved from room to room, the sun coming out to push away morning clouds and reveal a blue sky.

Plan to have lunch at Great Dixter, The Milk House or the next destination on the itinerary—Sissinghurst Castle Garden.

Since the middle ages, Sissinghurst has seen enormously diverse occupants and uses. A castle, a prison camp, a work house—the property was eventually purchased in the 20^th century by Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson, amateur gardeners and Bloomsbury Group intellectuals. They came to the property after Sackville-West’s ancestral home passed through primogeniture to her uncle and began from scratch to create what is now a world renowned garden.

The two had a loving, long term marriage; they were also gay, and both maintained relationships outside of their union. Sackville-West famously had an affair with writer Virginia Woolf. One of the couple’s sons, Nigel Nicolson, eventually published a book describing the unusual nature of his parents’ relationship. Titled Portrait of a Marriage: Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson, the book catapulted the property into public attention. Thanks to the garden’s intriguing origins and romantic approach to planting, it is now among the most visited properties in the National Trust collection.

The garden is designed around a progressing series of garden rooms, one of the first to be made in this now traditional style. Old brick walls and yew hedges (see: some full and green, some cut back to their brown bones for a fresh start) define these rooms, which proceed on an axis around a central circle of trimmed green grass. Each room has its own delights, often organized by color. One—a riot of fiery red, orange and yellow blooms. Another—all white flowers set against a mixture of glaucous plants and green leaves.

Sissinghurst continually spills over its own borders. An impossible profusion of tiny yellow roses blooms up Sissinghurst’s central tower. The climbing flowers are so numerous they appear to be a kind of cloud hovering against the body of the building. Sackville-West and Nicolson were passionate amateur gardeners, meaning they learned as they went. The property’s present gardeners do their best to keep this experimental spirit alive by limiting interference—allowing flowers to spread unexpectedly into new beds and heavy blooms to droop into the garden’s pathways. This lush, overgrown approach to planting creates a romanticism of atmosphere that is perhaps at the heart of the garden’s enduring charm.

For dinner, head to The Three Chimneys. The pub’s name is a French pun based on its location at the intersection of three roads. It comes from the French prisoners who were detained at nearby Sissinghurst during the Seven Years’ War. Les Trois Chemins, French for “the three paths,” became The Three Chimneys. In addition to playful nomenclature, the pub offers good food and a pleasant garden, if you haven’t had enough greenery yet for the day.

Condensed tour itinerary:

Day One: Leave London, lunch at Langshott Manor, visit Nymans, dinner at The Milk House, retire at Cloth Hall Oast Bed & Breakfast or Sissinghurst Castle Farmhouse.

Day Two: Visit Great Dixter House and Gardens, lunch at one of the gardens or return to The Milk House, visit Sissinghurst Castle Gardens, dinner at Three Chimneys, retire to same lodgings.

Day Three: Visit Pashley Manor Gardens, lunch at one of the gardens or Thackeray’s Restaurant, visit Penshurst Place, dinner at The Wheatsheaf, stay at Hever Castle Bed & Breakfast.

Day Four: Visit Hever Castle Gardens, lunch at Beaverbrook, return to London.

Nearby gardens that could be added to this tour: Knole, RHS Wisley, Chartwell, Lullingstone Castle, Great Comp Garden, Scotney Castle, Wakehurst, Godinton.

Sonia Feldman is a writer living in Cleveland, Ohio. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Cultured Magazine, Pembroke Magazine and Juked. She operates an email newsletter, which sends one good poem a week. Find more of her work on Instagram.

Langshott Manor, Nymans

by Sonia Feldman

After many years of refusing to learn even the names of plants, I took a big step in the other direction by agreeing to plan and then actually go on a tour of England’s great gardens with my mother. The following series gives an account of the four particularly glorious days of that trip during which we traveled through Kent, a region aptly named the Garden of England. Our tour took place at the end of May, and the descriptions of the gardens reflect that time of year. This is the first installment in the series. See the end of each article for a condensed itinerary of the entire tour.

Day One: Leave London, lunch at Langshott Manor, visit Nymans, dinner at The Milk House, retire at Cloth Hall Oast Bed & Breakfast or Sissinghurst Castle Farmhouse.

Head south from London in your rental car. After an hour or so of driving—time dependent on whether or not you immediately crash your vehicle on the wrong side of the road—stop for lunch at Langshott Manor. This 16^th century Elizabethan hotel is conveniently located just off the M23, and you will likely have the pretty garden behind the restaurant to yourself. Walk slowly to admire the deep flowering borders set against old brick walls crawling with fragrant white wisteria (see: a single orange poppy standing in a clutch of purple allium).

Once you’re stout with flowers and tea, continue on to Nymans. This is the only West Sussex garden on our tour because, even though we are heading to Kent, it can’t be missed. Nymans estate became a garden destination in the late 19^th century thanks to its purchase by Leonard Messel, a German Jew who settled in England. Messel was anxious to make friends and very reasonably concluded that integration into the stiff English social scene would be easier if he had a place to throw parties. With the help of his head gardener, James Comber, Messel successfully transformed Nymans’ expansive property into an exuberant outdoor destination for society events and later, the eager public.

Nymans is a garden full of ideas and enough space to house them. Visitors can admire a dry weather bed, a Mediterranean bed, a bed of enormous pink, orange, yellow and white rhododendrons growing all mixed up with one another, a sunken garden, a rock garden, a rose garden (see: nepeta at the feet of blushing pink rose bushes), a spring border that blooms only in the spring situated on an X axis with a summer border that only blooms in the summer and a truly incredible wisteria walk. The wisteria plants, over 100 years old, have trunks like trees and flowering purple racemes two feet long—a heaven of scent.

This combination of formal and informal gardens wraps around the house, leading the visitor to sprawling views of the dramatic High Weald of Sussex. The house, now partially in ruins, makes a romantic backdrop for the garden. A devastating fire in the middle of the 20^th century reduced much of the upper stories to a single façade, and its vacant windows make picture frames for the blue sky behind. Flowering plants climb the remaining stone exterior.

Stay until the garden closes at 5:00pm and then head east to reach your lodgings for the evening. We stayed at the well located and very charming Cloth Hall Oast Bed & Breakfast. The B&B is in fact a converted oast house—a building designed for drying hops—and has its own beautiful garden, pool and pond. The nearby Sissinghurst Castle Farmhouse is another convenient option for garden visiting. Finish the day with dinner at The Milk House, elevated pub fare with local ingredients in a 16^th century hall house.

Condensed tour itinerary:

Day One: Leave London, lunch at Langshott Manor, visit Nymans, dinner at The Milk House, retire at Cloth Hall Oast Bed & Breakfast or Sissinghurst Castle Farmhouse.

Day Two: Visit Great Dixter House and Gardens, lunch at one of the gardens or return to The Milk House, visit Sissinghurst Castle Gardens, dinner at Three Chimneys, retire to same lodgings.

Day Three: Visit Pashley Manor Gardens, lunch at one of the gardens or Thackeray’s Restaurant, visit Penshurst Place, dinner at The Wheatsheaf, stay at Hever Castle Bed & Breakfast

Day Four: Visit Hever Castle Gardens, lunch at Beaverbrook, return to London.

Nearby gardens that could be added to this tour: Knole, RHS Wisley, Chartwell, Lullingstone Castle, Great Comp Garden, Scotney Castle, Wakehurst, Godinton.

Sonia Feldman is a writer living in Cleveland, Ohio. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Cultured Magazine, Pembroke Magazine and Juked. She operates an email newsletter, which sends one good poem a week. Find more of her work on Instagram.