A quick post inspired by yesterday's pictures of the rose whose vigorous habit and mature state threatens to hide other plants and even parts of the house.
Hidden or lost gardens are a particular fascination of mine. I don't know where this started - an early reading of The Secret Garden, perhaps? Or was it a walk many years ago in the Perthshire garden pictured left when it was long abandoned and overgrown, the balustrade broken, the pool empty and the fountain dry?
If, like me, you are drawn to such places, then here are three books I can recommend which will feed your appetite for these forgotten pleasure grounds, some of them lost forever, others lost and found again.
Kathryn Bradley-Hole's Lost Gardens of England (from the archives of Country Life)
Jennifer Potter's Lost Gardens
Tim Smit's The Lost Gardens of Heligan (Heligan website here - listen to the birdsong!)
Every picture of these gardens in their heyday exudes a romanticism or suggests an idyll which masks the enormous amount of labour which went into their upkeep. Not only are the physical structures and the plantings no more, but the time in which they flourished and were photographed has gone too; we can't walk into that world -were we to try to re-create it - we can only glimpse its beauty as an outsider might look wistfully in through the garden gate.
