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| Lanhydrock House |
Cornwall is justly famous for many beautiful gardens, blessed as it is by a mild climate and sheltered valleys with acid soils much-suited to rhododendrons and azaleas. It's generally accepted that the time to see these at their best is during the spring, but our recent trip to visit friends and family in that part of the world proved that they can also be subtly beautiful on a misty day in November.
This was our first visit to Lanhydrock near Bodmin, and although the imposing house was closed (except for a Christmas dinner for its volunteers) the extensive grounds were open. There is a marvellous knot garden containing very fine clipped yew topiary - elegantly and simply done, not the rather grotesque peacock and chessmen style stuff that, to my mind, gives it a bad name! Gardens in that style work well all year round; in fact they often look at their most dramatic with a dusting of hoar-frost on a bright winter morning.
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| Topiary in the knot garden |
Possibly also with a view to winter structure, the gardeners at Lanhydrock take a relaxed view of tidying up the summer perennials at the end of the season. Gone are the days of cutting everything herbaceous to the ground at the end of October: instead, the beds and borders present a pallet of gentle greens, browns and yellows as the foliage ages, dotted with the dramatic seed heads of Agapanthus and Astilbe. It looks stunning, and I'm sure it's also great over-wintering habitat for all manner of insects too.
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| Don't cut back your summer perennials too early! |
There's a dramatic woodland walk rising behind the house through groves of rhododendrons, which shouldn't be in flower now, though a few confused specimens were. Drifts of Hydrangea, their predominantly blue tones hinting at the soil type, gave some dramatic splashes of colour from petals and foliage alike though the tendency was increasingly towards the muted shades of autumn.
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| Lanhydrock House from the woodland walk |
There are lots more photographs to enjoy of this lovely site at
http://www.flickr.com/photos/30634865@N03/sets/72157632113785451/ . I can't put too many on here without Google wanting me to cross their palm with silver for the privilege, which isn't going to happen while they're busy evading tax! I'll need to quietly go back and edit out some superfluous ones from old posts and increasingly rely on links to Flickr.
It was raining by the time we finished our walk round in the manner the Irish categorise as a 'fine, soft day', so some of the rather romantic misty look to the photos is simply down to raindrops on the camera lens. It's safe to assume they get a lot of rain here, even by North Staffs standards - you only have to look at the lichen growth to appreciate that!
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| Lots of lichen |
Luckily for Jon, a few impressive clumps of that had fallen out of the trees, so he should now have plenty of potential foliage for the model railway!
