The Charming Nook

Hello and welcome back to my blog.

I’m deviating from talking about my own garden today, as I recently spent some time away visiting Kew Gardens and the Chelsea Flower Show in London and I wanted to share some of the highlights from both (and keep my own records for looking back on).

I will be uploading a post soon about some of the key inspiration I took away from Chelsea this year, but today’s post is all about my visit to Kew Gardens.

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I have heard about Kew Gardens before, but this was my first time visiting. I didn’t see all of the gardens and because I had the Chelsea Flower Show to visit the next day, I decided just to prioritise seeing the gardens that piqued my interest. I plan to go back again (probably multiple times); I think you could try and see it all in one day, but it would be really jam-packed and quite rushed.

One of my favourite things to do when I visit a garden is to really linger in it, enjoy it and study the planting and design ideas. I don’t find I can properly do that when rushing through a vast amount of gardens in a day.

The Rose Garden

I started off my day visiting The Palm House and behind it found The Rose Garden. I always love rose gardens, so this was one of my favourite gardens of the day.

I visited on what was a fairly overcast day, with some light showers throughout, so I don’t feel I got to see the full glory that is a rose garden on a Summer’s day, but it was still beautiful.

I seem to naturally gravitate towards my favourite colour of roses – soft pinks, with blushes of peach. Here were a few of my favourites – I particularly LOVED the first rose pictured below with its clusters of roses on one stem; it shows the rose at various stages of flowering and is like a little bouquet all on its own:

Unless I was mistaken, I couldn’t locate a map or any signs that labelled what each variety of rose was. I would really love to find out what the first rose was!

The Waterlily House

I then stumbled across The Waterlily House, which was a pretty, victorian-style greenhouse with a large pond in the centre and smaller ponds around the sides, all filled with various waterlilies and aquatic plants. It made a very peaceful and interesting place to walk around:

The Great Broad Walk Borders

I then made my way down The Great Broad Walk Borders – this is a border filled with various perennials. It is punctuated all the way down with huge triangles of topiary.

The main flowers that caught my attention throughout the walk included –

Irises:

Delphiniums:

Alliums

I also really loved all the alliums scattered throughout the borders. The white alliums in particular looked so pretty and ethereal; they looked to me as if it was like a beautiful painting, with the pom poms of the alliums just dotted here and there throughout:

The purple alliums also gave great pops of impactful colour throughout the borders:

I would really love to incorporate some alliums, irises and delphiniums over time into my own planting schemes – they all punctuate the mass perennial planting and create a playful rhythm and movement through the beds. It was just gorgeous!

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At this point in the day, I was feeling slightly tired and needed a hot drink and a rest. The Orangery is located right at the end of The Great Broad Walk Borders, but I decided to carry on left to The Family Kitchen & Shop.

On the way, I passed another beautiful display of iris planted en masse. I loved the curved woven fencing used to edge the pathway and that is a design feature I am contemplating on using in another area of my garden… I love the soft and natural effect it gives; it is really in-keeping with a wilder and softer feel to the garden:

The Queen’s Garden

After I had a rest and some lunch, I went to visit The Queen’s Garden, which is located behind Kew Palace.

This actually turned out to be one of my favourite gardens of the day – it was quaint and had a lovely contrast between the gardens. It was elegant and understated, whilst still being impactful.

The entrance courtyard had a beautiful trained plant all the way up the side of the front of the house and some grape vines trained up one of the walls. I love plants trained into espalier and formal shapes and I plan to incorporate these design elements into my garden over time:

The Queen’s Garden is split into two main areas; the right side being a traditional, formal parterre:

I love the tried and tested design trick of using formal dwarf hedging to edge softer mass planting in the middle. One of the main plants used is one of my favourites – lavender:

The left side of the garden has a softer and wilder planting scheme. It has a curved walkway running around some of its sides:

You have a nice vantage point to survey the lower part of the garden from the archway:

As you can see, at this point it was raining, but this garden was really quiet as it was tucked away from the more central areas of Kew Gardens. I thoroughly enjoyed walking through this garden in the rain and I think it is a garden with design features that could be easily replicated in many gardens at home.

The central lower part of this garden included cottage-style planting and many of the plants were chosen for their medicinal qualities. It was fascinating to learn about this as I walked around the garden.

I also saw some Honesty within the planting, which is a plant I’d love to add into The Wild Borders – think its ethereal beauty when the seed heads turn papery and silvery will look striking in the Autumn and Winter:

The central part of this garden also incorporated some more woven-style fencing to edge one of the borders, which again caught my eye as inspiration for own garden:

Kew’s Kitchen Garden

I spent the rest of my day seeing some of the other gardens, which were also very nice, but nothing specifically caught my eye.

However, one final garden that I enjoyed looking at for inspiration was Kew’s Kitchen Garden.

If you read my posts, you will be aware that I recently planted out some strawberries, potatoes and a globe artichoke, which you can read about here.

I do intend to create a dedicated fruit and vegetable growing area in my garden, but the plans are not properly laid out yet, so I’ve been growing produce in large tubs and containers for now.

Kew’s Kitchen Garden gave me some great ideas to take away with me; it showed how to get the most from your space at home, taking into account that many of us do not have a great deal of space to dedicate solely to growing produce at home:

We have many birds visiting our garden and we have rooks that nest in a large near-by tree not far from our garden. I have really wanted to plant out some raspberry canes in the garden, but I have held off because I am very wary of this attracting the rooks.

I have been contemplating for some time installing a walk-in fruit cage, where I could grow all the fruits and vegetables I like. Something like this:

I also saw a more relaxed DIY version of the above, simply using large wooden posts set into the ground, with netting draped over:

Whilst both of the above would serve the purpose of protecting any fruits or vegetables, I am still brainstorming my ideas, as I want it to look in-keeping with the rest of the garden.

I think I will also probably incorporate some flowers amongst any vegetable or fruit planting I put in. I liked that they included dahlias into the kitchen garden at Kew:

I know that dahlias were originally grown to be eaten, but I would simply grow flowers for the sake of their beauty in a kitchen garden.

I also liked the use of vertical training of plants on the walls in the kitchen garden:

All in all, I had a really nice day out at Kew Gardens and plan to go back again in the future.

I will be posting soon about some inspiration that I’ve taken back from visiting the Chelsea Flower Show this year and also some other little projects I’ve been getting on with in my own garden. Happy gardening 🙂

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