June is peak season to visit England...but it is worth every extra penny for the gorgeous flower show! I had to make myself stop taking pictures of roses because I was running out of storage space.
Really, anywhere I looked something was blooming. The medians and sides of roads generally weren't mowed. There were wildflowers and sometimes intentionally planted flowers. One sweet moment was looking out the window while my train was stopped at a small station and noticing an older lady planting flowers in one of the beds. I assume she was probably a volunteer, which made me smile at the commitment to beauty.
In addition to all the wild beauty, I think it charming that the green space around a person's house is automatically called a garden, while in the US, we would call it a yard or lawn. Some people might choose to put a garden in their yard, but it's not the default. In England, even the language seems to point to the default of loving flowers.
I also went to a few large, planned gardens including the Oxford Botanical Gardens and a few gardens associated with old manor houses. The most stunning was definitely Iford Manor.
Iford Manor is a Georgian house, simple but large and elegant with a couple acres of gardens around it, mostly in the Italian style. We had a little over an hour to explore the garden and I really struggled with that time limit! I wanted to see everything and every angle, but was worried I might miss something if I lingered too long in any one area. Different sections of the garden reflected different styles of gardening, yet everything felt very seamless with natural paths between areas.
Parts of it were oriental in style, others reflected Roman/Greek architecture with a "folly" (a building built to look like an old Italian ruin). Parts included open grassy areas, others had paths through open meadows or close, shady woods. All of the spaces that opened up into a view were meticulously planned.
Below the house is a stream with Britannia standing guard on the bridge. Some of our group went mudlarking, wading in the water and poking in the soft mud looking for old bits of pottery. I ended up getting a small dime size piece of blue and white pottery from the river.
I love all of the plants that grow in the crevices of the walls. It makes such a beautiful and interesting walkway.
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