Open Gardens 2020

We continue our look around members’ gardens in 2020 featuring another “Virtual Open Garden” as part of our programme showing a different garden every week. This is because we can’t visit gardens in person due to Coronavirus. A new garden will be posted up on the web-site each Sunday for the following week. To see the gardens featured previously, click on “Archives” and the tabs “August 2020”, “July 2020” and “June 2020″ in the right hand panel to scroll through the earlier gardens. The owners of gardens that have been already been featured are:

• Carrie & Matt Lyons
• Colin & Diana Barber
• Glenys McDonald
• Lillian Taylor
• Alison & David Claridge
• Sir Keith and Lady Mills
• Judy & Bill Liddall
• Jean & John Tune
• Carole & Mike Marks
• Gill & Bill Long
• Gel Vivian

Future Gardens will include those of: Julie Watkins & Andy.

Any if you would like to feature your garden please contact Michael Marks by e-mail: michael.marks7@btinternet.com

To see the garden photos in the best format click on the first picture below, which will open up the picture in full screen and then click through the photos using arrows to the right (sequence forward) and left (sequence back) of the screen.

John Perry’s Garden is this weeks featured garden. His garden will be well known to many of you as he opens it regularly, not just for the BGA Open Gardens, but also for Hospice in the Weald and the National Garden Scheme. Most of these photos we taken on 3 September, but some are included from the last 5 years so they show a different season and aspect to the garden. John describes his garden:

The original cottage on the site was built in the 1870’s as part of the stable block for Bidborough Court. It was subsequently used for farm managers accommodation, but over the years it had suffered from subsidence and obviously needed to have something done about it. This coincided with our desire to downsize from Four Winds House, so we decided to rebuild on the original site, taking full advantage of the fantastic views. In 2015 we called in some garden designers to create a garden on this very steep and “sheer” site. The result, as you can see, has taken full advantage of the unusual position and although we have continued to work on the garden, considering it is only just 5 years old it looks pretty amazing.

After we moved into the house, in an adjacent field we discovered in the remains of an old Victorian rockery installed by the owner of Bidborough Court as it leads down to the boating lake. There are also two ponds (ex bomb craters?) that we had never noticed before as sheep had obliterated them over the years. We decided to extend the garden to include these features and we are busy planting up this area as an ongoing project. Our real satisfaction from this project is that most of the planting is from our own cuttings and divisions taken from the rest of the garden.

My gardener and I get a great deal of pleasure from the garden and we hope that when things get back to normal we can open the garden up again to visitors, so you can enjoy it too. In the meantime enjoy the pictures below, which include some taken over the last 5 years.