Visits-UK

Time for the first EBTS UK garden visits of the year and the good old British weather brought us heavy April Showers! Still this didn’t stop us enjoying three gardens in Surrey.

The late-summer trip was carefully designed to include some of the most beautiful gardens in Florence, all incorporating fine examples of box and topiary. As part of the trip EBTS also visited Romiti & Giusti near Lucca, a specialist nursery exporting topiary sculptures all over the world: here you could order any topiary form, from teacup to tennis player.

A morning visit to Rustling End Cottage in Codicote, with a wealth of good planting and cushions of box, was followed by a special private visit to the gardens at Bride Hall, rarely open to the public, with topiary, a parterre and famous water features.

Things didn’t bode well for the first garden visit of 2015, a crash on the M1 threatened to make the views of cars on tarmac rather than beautiful gardens and wonderful topiary and after that cleared the weather tried it’s hardest to put a dampener on the day.

A year after it’s hard cutting back to reduce it’s size and improve it’s shape, The Garden House parterre is growing back well as can be seen in the updated photographs Rowena has kindly sent through.

At the end of September EBTS visited the Italian Lakes for an extended weekend four day trip visiting seven gardens.

Pictures and a short video of the gardens visited as part of the EBTS UK AGM weekend in Cambridge.

With the weather forecast threatening rain, it was touch and go whether we would end up soaked, but with the usual EBTS UK good luck we only had a brief burst of rain which didn’t dampen our enjoyment in the slightest.