Kathy Brown's Garden

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We’re experiencing a few days of unusually hot weather here in the UK, with glorious sunshine and high temperatures that cause me to wilt faster than the plants. It’s hard to spend much time in the garden (for me, at least, the neighbours don’t seem to suffer the same problem!) and so there’s a tendency to stick to doing the bare essentials – mainly watering.

But today I have already spent an hour in the garden, repotting sunflower and nasturtium seedlings that won’t survive another scorching day in tiny amounts of soil, and giving everything a good soak with the hose before the heat of the day.

Despite the heat, yesterday Pete and I went to visit Kathy Brown’s garden in Stevington, Bedfordshire. It’s about 1.5 hours drive from here, but I particularly wanted to see it as Kathy is the author of a book on Edible Flowers and has one of the few open gardens where edible flowers are a real feature. (My copy of Kathy’s book arrived on Friday, so expect a review in due course!)

As I am consciously incorporating edible flowers in my garden for the first time this year, I just had to go. But actually, with the odd weather we’ve been having, gardens are a few weeks behind schedule this year, and in retrospect yesterday wasn’t the best day to choose to see the edible flowers – they just weren’t blooming.

Kathy & Simon (her husband) have obviously put a lot of time and effort into their garden for many years. Their 4.5 acre plot is a design showcase, divided up into garden ‘rooms’ with different themes and feels. This room, inspired by painter Mark Rothko, was stunning – great slabs of colour created just by hedging.


Rothko Room

There are plenty of lovely container displays around the garden. This one, created in a disused fish pond, was particularly impressive:


Fish Pond

Amd behind the fish pond a lovely, shady ‘grotto’ type area had been created using reclaimed telepgraph poles, some of which even still had their identification numbers on:


Grotto

If I had the space then I would recreate something similar here, as my garden is pitifully short on shade in this weather and shade-tolerant plants are even less at home out there than I am.


Egglings

What I most liked about the garden (beyond its edible plants) was the way that quirky and recycled touches were incorporated everywhere. You can see more photos in my Flickr set, and as well as her website Kathy keeps a blog. Her garden is open for several days a year, including several under the NGS scheme. Check Kathy’s website for more details.

Posted 24 May 2010, 06:26.   Posted in .
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