One of the best ways–often the only way–to visit the finest privately owned gardens in the country is by joining an exclusive tour. Non Morris tags along.
I’m sitting on a Persian-carpeted veranda in the loveliest of west Dorset gardens admiring our picnic lunch: huge platters of asparagus, overfilled sandwiches and seriously good Scotch eggs. We have explored the garden, laced with delicate wisteria and radiant with ferns and Solomon’s seal, and paused in the blossom-laden apple orchard. Now, we are embarking on a cider tasting led by poet and cider historian James Crowden. If you don’t drink cider, worry not: organic apple juice or Champagne?
This is the G&T Garden Tours Earthly Paradise tour, a blissful six days visiting west Dorset’s finest gardens, master-minded by magazine editor-turned-passionate gardener Simon Tiffin and Country Life columnist Jason Goodwin. Our small group — from the US, Australia, Spain and the UK — is entertained from the moment we climb onto the Goodwin-chauffeured minibus. We stay at Symondsbury Manor, amid the friendly and generous atmosphere of the best weekend house party — towering cakes for tea, delicious dinners with wines selected by G&T friend (and wildflower gardener) Johnnie Boden and breakfasts paired with orange juice hand-squeezed by Mr Goodwin or Mr Tiffin as they describe the delights of the day ahead.
Cottage-garden planting and endless views at Jasper Conran’s garden at Bettiscombe Manor in Dorset, on G&T Garden Tours.
It is special — and hilarious — to be shooed deep into the borders at Julian and Isabel Bannerman’s Ashington Manor, to breathe in the heady scent of Cardiocrinum giganteum and a privilege to be able to ask about each plant in the gorgeously coloured double borders. There are strolls with Jaspar Conran discussing his idyllic cottage-garden planting at Bettiscombe Manor and an afternoon with garden designer Tania Compton exploring the atmospheric space made by the late artist John Hubbard in the picturesque hamlet of Chilcombe. Another G&T friend, Howard Sooley, will call in one evening over drinks to talk about his approach to photographing gardens…
There is, it seems, a new era of relaxed, quietly exclusive and refreshingly quirky garden tours. Another option might be to travel with the Land Gardeners, Henrietta Courtauld and Bridget Elworthy, to Cornwall, France or Ireland. Known for their belief in the role of soil as the foundation of a garden, the Land Gardeners’s tours include an element of teaching, as well as visits to special and often very private gardens.
The Cornish tour is based at Mrs Courtauld’s family home in Cornwall and takes place in March to coincide with the magnolias, camellias and rhododendrons. Roses are the focus of the early-June French tour, ‘especially species and old-fashioned roses’. It begins at Mrs Elworthy’s stylish home at Château de la Rongère in the northern Loire valley and includes trips to quintessential rose nurseries, gardens and galleries in and around Paris. The Ireland tour will include stays at garden designer Catherine FitzGerald’s family home, Glin Castle, and later Charlie Bigham and Claire Worthington’s home, Derreen on the Beara Peninsula in south-west Co Kerry, where the romantic 19th-century garden is known for its wild beauty.
Meet the garden designers Julian and Isabel Bannerman on a tour of their garden at Ashington Manor in Somerset, which features in Mrs Bannerman’s 2022 book Husbandry, on a visit with G&T Garden Tours.
The Land Gardeners started the tours ‘to keep seeing gardens and learning ourselves’ and clearly enjoy managing the details that make the trips so special. They describe picnics in bothies with thermos flasks, hot-water bottles and linen napkins, roses from the garden in the bedrooms and taking ‘tiny boats over to an island with an enchanting garden’.
The Land Gardeners’s Irish tour includes Glin Castle on the banks of the River Shannon.
If you are shorter on time, Gravetye Manor in West Sussex can provide a concentrated — and delicious — day of garden escape. Originally the home of William Robinson, the man who turned the formal Victorian idea of gardening on its head and introduced us to a more natural approach, Gravetye is now a hotel, its grounds cared for by former Great Dixter head gardener Tom Coward.
The tour, led by Mr Coward or one of his team, gives you time to explore every inch of Gravetye’s exuberant borders and dazzling wildflower meadow and includes an exploration of the original oval walled kitchen garden. The day concludes with a lunch of chargrilled daylilies — tender and bittersweet — and a pudding of glazed roast fennel with honey ice cream and yuzu lemon from the restored peach house.
Gravetye Manor. Credit: Albert Knapp / Alamy
Border Lines’s James Bolton is the David Attenborough of garden visiting. Following a 30-year career as a garden designer, nursery-man, head gardener and Inchbald’s director of Design History, Mr Bolton paves the way to ‘really special private gardens my clients know they can’t get into by paying £5 at the door’.
An ideal day will be three gardens, with a convivial lunch with the owner in the middle one. ‘We might have coronation chicken, new potatoes, a fruity pudding and a glass or two of white wine.’ Mr Bolton is particularly pleased when his garden owners start coming on his tours: ‘They do quite often!’
Visit Cadhay House in Ottery St Mary, Devon, with Border Lines.
How to book
G&T Garden Tours — www.gtgardentours.co.uk
The Land Gardeners — www.thelandgardeners.com
Gravetye Manor, West Sussex — www.gravetyemanor.co.uk
Border Lines — www.border-lines.co.uk
More of the best garden tours
Tod Garden Tours’s
Michael Marriott, one of the world’s leading rosarians, and horticulturalist Rosie Irving create a particularly relaxed, knowledgeable, and friendly atmosphere on both day tours in the UK and longer tours to Irish gardens. Their format is to bring together a small group of keen gardeners who arrange their own travel and generally bring a picnic lunch. Don’t expect to see rose gardens alone, but ‘there is always a smattering of roses in every garden’ and everything you have ever wanted to know about a certain rose can be answered. Catering exceptions are made if the afternoon is spent in the garden of Charlie McCormick and Ben Pentreath — tea will be served with one of Mr McCormick’s legendary sponge cakes and, at the exuberant colour-filled Patthana Garden in Co Wicklow, a delicious, equally colourful lunch is always part of the experience.
Tod Garden Tours — www.michaelmarriottrosarian.org
The Garden Museum in Lambeth, London SE1
A fresh raft of hugely varied, carefully curated garden days each year. The tours are meticulously run as a charitable venture and benefit hugely from the glittering address book of museum director Christopher Woodward. Guests are ferried to the gardens from a local station and there is always a memorable lunch, perhaps in a magical Devon garden designed by Dan Pearson or at an atmospheric pub near Olivia Laing’s restored garden in Suffolk.
The Garden Museum, London SE1 — www.gardenmuseum.org.uk
The National Garden Scheme
The NGS has paved the way for inspiring visits since 1927. Particularly special gardens, such as Polly Nicholson’s Blackland House in Wiltshire, sell out fast. Your booking speed and your modest entrance fee (entirely for good causes) will be rewarded with a blissful spell strolling among every kind of luscious tulip in this exquisite five-acre garden. There is a cheerful and generous tea by the calming pool, too.
National Garden Scheme — www.ngs.org.uk
