Chelsea Flower Show & Gardens Tour 2019

After arrival into London please make your way to your hotel. Check in 3 pm and if you arrive earlier they will hold your luggage. Once in your room, unpack that bag and put it away…you won’t need to see it again for 8 nights.

The Copthorne Tara Hotel London Kensington is a contemporary hotel in prestigious Kensington, located just behind High Street Kensington Metro station. Renowned for its warm hospitality, the hotel offers well-appointed and comfortable guest rooms with an enviable central location in Kensington. The hotel is a short stroll away from Kensington Palace and Kensington Gardens including the Princess Diana Memorial Gardens, and also very close to the Science Museum and Natural History Museum. High Street Kensington’s ‘first class’ shops are only a stone throw away from the hotel. At the metro station you will find all kinds of places to eat as well as Marks & Spencer and Boots drugs.

Your standard room includes with one bed for Double and Single or twin beds for those sharing. WiFi is complimentary and so are coffee and tea making facilities. There is also a mini fridge, safe, hairdryer and trouser press.

https://www.millenniumhotels.com/en/london/copthorne-tara-hotel-london-kensington/#home

We will meet later on this evening in the hotel restaurant for our Welcome Dinner which will be three courses including a glass of wine.

After breakfast we will leave by coach for our visit to this delightfully plant packed garden. Our guide will highlight the most important aspects as this is a huge property…

Wisley was founded by Victorian businessman and RHS member George Ferguson Wilson, who purchased a 60-acre site in 1878. He established the “Oakwood Experimental Garden” on part of the site, where he attempted to “make difficult plants grow successfully”. Wilson died in 1902 and Oakwood was purchased by Sir Thomas Hanbury, the creator of the celebrated garden La Mortola on the Italian Riviera. He gave both sites to the RHS the following year. Wisley is now a large and diverse garden covering 240 acres. In addition to numerous formal and informal decorative gardens, several glasshouses and an extensive arboretum, it includes small scale “model gardens” which are intended to show visitors what they can achieve in their own gardens, and a trials field where new cultivars are assessed.

We should be there at the perfect time for the Rhododendrons and Azaleas and you will have time after the guide leaves us to enjoy the garden on your own and have lunch on your own at their fabulous café with views to the gardens. Be sure to check out the new exotic garden. The garden will showcase a diverse range of plants, from palms and bananas to vibrant flowers such as dahlias, cannas and gazanias. Providing an alluring contrast from the nearby Bowes-Lyon Rose Garden and Cottage Garden, the oasis will feature more than 100 species originating from tropical areas as far as Brazil and South Africa in an array of bold shapes and textures.

https://www.rhs.org.uk/gardens/wisley

https://www.rhs.org.uk/gardens/wisley/map interactive map

Return back to hotel with your evening at leisure.

Breakfast included with lunch and dinner on your own.

We will arrive at the gates just prior to them opening and once in you will be able to pick up your show guide and start enjoying this most prestigious flower show. I will share some of my tips on enjoying this show on our way back from RHS Wisley so you can arrive prepared.

After you have finished seeing all you want to see – it is open until 8 pm for those diehards – then you can make your own way back to the hotel. This way you are free to enjoy the show for as long as you like.

I would suggest that either tonight or tomorrow night would be the nights to book shows or theatre as the tour days are not advised. We just do not know about traffic and I would hate for you to miss an event that you had planned to go to.

https://www.rhs.org.uk/

Return back to hotel with your evening at leisure.

Breakfast included with lunch and dinner on your own.

In my tour notes to you, sent out about a month before the tour begins, I include lots of ideas on what to do with your day of leisure.

Breakfast included with lunch and dinner on your own

Scotney Castle is an English country house with formal gardens south-east of Lamberhurst in the valley of the River Bewl in Kent, England. It belongs to the National Trust. The gardens are a celebrated example of the Picturesque style. The central feature is the ruins of a 14^th century medieval, moated manor house, Scotney Old Castle, which is on an island on a small lake. The lake is surrounded by sloping, wooded gardens with fine collections of rhododendrons, azaleas and kalmia for spring colour. When I was there last the old castle had the most glorious white wisteria cascading over the walls.  It is picture perfect and the castle is open now so that you can go inside to see what it looks like, looking out. You can also see the secret chamber which used to harbour a Jesuit priest at the time that being a Catholic was illegal. He sought escape here from 1591 – 1598.  On the way down to the old castle take the time to smell and admire all the Rhododendrons and Azaleas. There is a café and shop here.

A short history http://www.britainexpress.com/counties/kent/castles/scotney.htm

Website https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/scotney-castle

Bateman’s Garden, East Sussex ‘For the Glory of the Garden, that it may not pass away!’ Rudyard Kipling.

‘A seventeenth century house with a twentieth century garden made by Rudyard Kipling, who lived here 1902-36. One might expect the design to recall his love of India. But it is an ‘Old English’ Arts and Crafts garden of the type one dreams of when sipping gin and tonic by the Irrawaddy River, to fend off malaria. The garden has a tunnel made of pear trees, yew hedges, stone paths, a rose garden, pond, wild garden and herb garden.’  It was his sanctuary…in the spring sunshine the garden and estate at Bateman’s are bursting with life and colour. Take time to explore the beautiful countryside that was the inspiration for Kipling… After Kipling’s death in 1936 Bateman’s passed to his wife Carrie. Following her death in 1939 the house and 330 acres of land were given to the National Trust as a memorial to her husband. There is a café and shop here.

Spring in the garden… https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/batemans/features/spring-in-the-garden-at-batemans

Website https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/batemans/features/the-glory-of-the-garden-at-batemans

Return back to hotel with your evening at leisure.

Breakfast included with lunch and dinner on your own.

Great Dixter is a house in Northiam, East Sussex, England. It was built in 1910–12 by architect Edwin Lutyens, who combined an existing mid-15th century house on the site with a similar structure brought from Benenden, Kent, together with his own additions. It is a Grade I listed building. (In simple terms, if a building is Grade 1 listed it is deemed to be of exceptional interest and may also have been judged to be of significant national importance. Grade 1 listing is usually reserved for much older and historically-important buildings) The garden, widely known for its continuous tradition of sophisticated plantsmanship, is Grade I listed in the National Register of Historic Parks and Gardens. Great Dixter was the family home of gardener and gardening writer Christopher Lloyd – it was the focus of his energy and enthusiasm and fuelled over 40 years of books and articles. Now under the stewardship of Fergus Garrett and the Great Dixter Charitable Trust, Great Dixter is an historic house, a garden, a center of education, and a place of pilgrimage for horticulturists from across the world. As you enter the grounds you are struck at the sight of the house, so perfect in every quirky way and the planting is perfectly suited to the timbered façade. As you walk through the various gardens you are in fact walking around the house as well.  Perfectly placed plants surrounding home, barns and oast houses. There is a café and shop here.

Interactive map of gardens https://www.greatdixter.co.uk/plan-your-visit/map/

Website https://www.greatdixter.co.uk/garden/garden-tour/

Every gardener I think has heard of Vita Sackville-West and now you are in for another exceptional garden as we visit the home of Vita and her husband Harold Nicolson. They lived at Sissinghurst until 1962, the year she passed away and then in 1967 Harold gave Sissinghurst to the National Trust. She was a prolific writer, poet and most of all gardener. Their history as a couple is really quite amazing and many books have been written on it. The tower is where she wrote novels, plays, poetry and gardening books and is still left as though she was just out for a moment checking something in the garden. There is a café and shop here.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/gardening/9346537/Vita-Sackville-West-her-gardening-legacy.html

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/11166590/the-many-sides-of-vita-sackville-west.html

https://www.greatbritishgardens.co.uk/garden-designers/31-vita-sackville-west-1892-1962.html

https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/sissinghurst-castle-garden

Return back to hotel with your evening at leisure.

Breakfast included with lunch and dinner on your own.

After a hearty breakfast, we are off to the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew. Kew Gardens is a world heritage site and a place of global significance. Kew contains the most diverse collection of living plants of any botanic garden in the world. The collection contains plants from tropical, temperate, arid and alpine climates, and are grown out in the Gardens and in controlled conditions within glasshouses and nurseries. A must visit is the Palm House…and the Marianne North Gallery for the most remarkable collection of botanical paintings you will ever see…833 paintings from her travels around the world. There are cafes and shops here. To help get you around, we are including the Kew Explorer train ticket which is hop on hop off throughout the garden.

Map of garden – takes a while to download

https://www.kew.org/sites/default/files/kew_map_nov2017.pdf

Map of the Kew Explorer Train route

https://www.kew.org/sites/default/files/Kew%20Explorer%20Route-and-Stops-February-2018.jpg

https://www.kew.org/

Return back to hotel with your evening at leisure.

Breakfast included with lunch and dinner on your own.

Now you have seen some extraordinary gardens on this tour and it only seems fitting that the last garden we visit should be West Green House Gardens…it is also extraordinary!! In a beautiful corner of North Hampshire, visit a garden of contrast and inspiration, created by acclaimed garden designer Marylyn Abbott. It is a garden with a special and distinctive sense of place created over two decades by Marylyn Abbott a renowned Australian garden designer whose twin passions for English Gardens and International Opera have created a unique environment. West Green House Gardens combines neo-classical style with contemporary design. A grand water staircase provides a focal point to the Nymphaeum Fountain designed by architect Quinlan Terry. The magnificent Walled Garden, faithfully restored to its original lines, is entered through an arbor of wisteria. An alley of apple trees divides an elaborate potager with its berry-filled fruit cages, annual flowers and colourful vegetables from its signature perennial borders exuberantly planted in subtle hues of mauve, plum and blue. There is a lot more to discover here. There is a lovely gift shop here as well.

To finish off our tour we will also enjoy a wonderful Afternoon Tea in the original Orangery, built in the 1770’s. This is a delightful and enchanting setting, filled to the rafters with plants and garden accessories. The perfect spot to chat and say Farewell….

Map of the Garden http://westgreenhouse.co.uk/garden/

Website http://westgreenhouse.co.uk/

Return back to hotel with your evening at leisure.