This is too long to read in an email - if you want it all, it’s the app or (my preference) the website.
I need to start by exploring just what a garden like Rosemoor means to me. I’ve spent a long time trying to make sense of my responses to gardens like this, which do, after all, seem to be the very peak of model star gardens to most of the gardening public. But they do tend to leave me a little cold, even in a heatwave.
Here’s a clue, from The History of RHS Garden Rosemoor:
“Filled with an astounding collection of plants including rhododendrons, camellias, roses, and champion trees, a series of garden areas leads visitors from one joyous area to the next.”
This garden is unashamedly a plant collection. And that becomes clear as you arrive.
Though visitors should be warned that labelling is always totally problematic in a garden and you need to check carefully before purchasing something you fell in love with. I found many misleading labels due to the season or perhaps sudden deaths. Hopefully AI will kill these eyesores one day, but I don’t expect it soon.
Sometimes it’s just a bit funny:
It’s intended to be educational:
And although it was once a person’s (a plant collector..) own garden, it has been expanded far beyond that original site. (See history) Rather like that other famous garden, Wildside, it has been dramatically shaped with earth moving machines:
“More than 13,000 tonnes of soil were removed from the new entrance area and car park, and redistributed in the Formal Garden area to level off the site.”
So it cannot be thought of as a response to its site or to a sense of place. I don’t think it aims to be beautiful or exciting. Which is what I look for in a garden, along with seats.
But I believe it is offering what the majority of garden visitors expect and enjoy, and that probably applies to readers of this post too.
Here’s the Plan:
It’s big. Happily it does have lots of seats. And two cafes. Good cream teas.
We started, after odd pauses and sits =
at the Queen Mother’s Rose Garden, with lots of labelled roses - good if you’re wanting to see roses in the flesh. I think there’s another rose garden too, for shrub roses - this may be that one.
Then there are Model Gardens, which I confess we didn’t seem able to make much sense of.
Let’s consider a garden we did like. Charles especially:
Charles enjoyed the use of water and the plant selection. The paths are wheelchair wide, but none the worse for it.
Outside that garden there’s lots of this kind of thing:
There’s a Hot Garden looking not so hot. I guess if you make gardens with bulldozers you then have to invent notions about what you install on the site. And it’s good if everyone’s heard of ‘Hot Gardens,’ ‘Cottage Gardens’ and the like.
I think this is from the inevitable Cottage Garden:
There’s a meadow, looking very tidy, flat and new and not a bit like the older version at Veddw: (reassuring if you want to make a new one yourself. Maybe it takes a few lifetimes to look really rough) Rosemoor has some great orchids.
Labelling at its worst:
Can we perhaps be happy with one good plant in a pot?
OK - what about the things we liked??!! (About time) I must have liked some things because Charles caught me smiling:
So, pleasures: here, a delight by the cafe:
Three beautiful ferns, grouped together. Lovely. Dryopteris erythorosa Brilliance, I think. Worth eating a cream tea in order to enjoy that sight.
Some pillars. I think I like them. Or are they just a bit pointless?
But the place we both loved was the Rock Gully, by the Underpass:
Cool, soothing, and beautifully planted.
And nearby a tremendous plant:
I think we enjoyed our visit. If you want to discover labelled plants you will be happier here than in a nursery, as you can see them planted in ideal conditions and often in full growth rather than in pots. There are seats and cream teas: what’s not to love?
Though - should you wish to critique Veddw Garden, we are open on Sunday afternoon 7th June. https://veddw.com/ (Many seats, sadly no cream teas)
There’s not really a word for Super Horticultral Museum Slash Park, is there? Not been yet, but this is how I think of Wisley, for example, which I like very much. But there are gardens and gardens, and for my preferred type I need to feel that there’s a gardener, or at least to sense their ghost wafting about the place tutting at what the new lot are doing with the planting. The other type is great when I want a cream tea and to gen up on my plant knowledge without having to say “are you really sure??” to a plant app 17 times before it admits it had no idea and was just trying to make me happy by suggesting any old nonsense.
I suppose 'if you make gardens with bulldozers' is the point, isn't it? Maybe that's why a lot of Capability Brown stuff leaves me a bit cold, too. If you've got the resources to completely reshape the whole landscape, ok, well done you, but it's 1) a little bit like cheating and 2) you've lost any of the interesting difficult bits that give it a personality. I'm not *super* convinced it's a great way to showcase plants either. I kind of want to know where those plants will thrive *without* the previous intervention of the bulldozer and the tonnes of moved soil, right?!