Pictures of a Beautiful Garden

Foxglve seedling and tightly clipped hedge joy

I want to show you pictures of this beautiful garden I visited recently. I caught wind of this garden via my fellow Scribehound writer Annie Guilfoyle, who wrote about this amazing place back in December and I immediately booked tickets for their May opening.

Caisson is owned and gardened by Phil and Amanda Honey, both of whom used to do garden set design for the film industry, and it shows. This garden is uniquely inspiring to me; it takes an incredibly challenging landscape and builds upon it with such confidence, and elan. The sheer magnitude of this project would have scared me witless, but this duo, unbothered, have managed to create a garden that feels like it was meant to be there and is unmistakeably a home.

Caisson was the headquarters of a canal company, transporting coal to nearby Bath and beyond from the many surrounding collieries that once dotted this landscape. There are multiple disused canals all over the property…great deep gashes, now empty of water, made of gigantic stone blocks - fabulously spooky - and the Honeys have used this feature beautifully. I won’t go on…you can read Annie’s article here.

Caisson open days here.

Water

Snaking rills, like mini-canals, and a giant perfect pond

Texture

Deeply satisfying boggy planting by the pond, perfect re-purposed ironwork for the rill, and soft erigeron steps

Colour

Big bold planting: Bright and bruised

Framing

Money shot: Bridge with view through to one of the canals

Mown path to focal point. These meadows are orchid havens

Heavenly gates

Taming

Lots and lots of clipping happens here, balancing the wilderness, and framing everything. Terrace of dreams achieved by pollarding these giants. Happy happy irises beneath.

clip clip clip - wall-trained fruit and giant taxus balls

Hope that was inspiring - their website has more (rather more gorgeous) pictures.

In other news I am sitting squarely inside half term. I do think it is strange that I never seem to get anything done, even though my children hardly need babysitting any more. I think this is the result of so many years of trying to do things, beginning them, and then being called away, or pulled away, by a child, or the need for lunch…always always lunch. My lizard brain has perhaps chosen this inertia. We must exert control over our lizard brains I think.

Please do give this post a heart if you liked it?

x Laetitia