Activities

Sunday 18th May 2021

Just… we motored down to the Saville Gardens, Windsor Great Park, quite a few Sundays ago. The Royal Family weren’t absolutely at the forefront of our minds that day although there was the quiet glow of Edinburgh being behind the Dawn Redwood trees and the organic Visitor Centre where we achieved lunch… can you imagine?

So we had not forgotten Edinburgh and all the Royal Family. Royston has done so much, it’s impossible to keep up. Robert Nevil and the Nizam refuse to watch any more Royal documentaries and we’re having a thing called The Hunter at dinner time – it’s about the Mafia. Superb. So I haven’t got round to viewing The Compassionate Duchess yet. The Compassionate Duchess is Katherine Kent. But the Gay Mother watched it and said she’s not demented at all, just old.

The Saville Garden is marvellous. I think these old-fashioned grand gardens, essentially specimen trees, rhododendrons, camillias and so on, are due for a revival. Here somebody thought way beyond their own lifetime, sixty years or more beyond to when the vistas would be fully grown. The post-War idea was that this sort of garden was gloomy and uninteresting, as well as impossible to maintain in the modern era. Vita, Gertrude, Christo and Beth didn’t like rhododendrons and conifers.

Well, the Saville Garden is exactly how you wouldn’t garden at home. All the more reason to treasure it, I’d say. The colours and variety of the azaleas and rhododendrons are amazing when on a grand scale. I liked the way the garden didn’t reveal itself, even when you were in it. Many secret enclosures and often you could see a magnificent tree of a rare colour rising from a mass of shrubs and other trees but never actually find where it was growing or what it was.

Afterwards a few weeks later, I was by chance at Beth’s with Robert Neville and the Nizam. Extraordinary. It’s rather like how now Stravinsky sounds more like Brahms than he did in 1914. Beth’s is in fact the same grand vision as the Saville Garden – a lake, huge trees… her underplanting may be woodlandy natives improved into rarity by hybridisation but really it’s the same idea. Beth’s is a park or a nature walk in the woods where she expanded into her woods in later years. The newer bit in the middle connecting the original part and the woodland has just a hint of the municipal. It’s hard to say why. The view of some nearby ‘storage units’ for rent and the exposure of flat, dreary Essex beyond doesn’t help.

From Beth’s Robert Nevil suggested Layer Marney which got off to a good start by being in a dip. A spot of charm in all flat Essex. A 15th century church in real old rose Tudor brick with amazing stonework and Tudor tombs within – you know, those knights laying down forever. The graveyard had a woman called Frank in it, died in the 1980s, wife of a colonel and also a churchwarden, took in 1981 at the age of 91, who was a ‘Yeoman farmer’, and a ‘friend of little children’. Worrying these days.  Beside the church, though, unbelievable, a kind of Tudor power station, a massive brick tower and flanking buildings. Just a little creepy, so vast, as well as being there in the middle of nowhere and nobody’s ever heard of it, hardly. But surely a wonder of the Tudor world. You couldn’t go in. It’s used for weddings.

The Saville Garden, Windsor Great Park

The Saville Garden, Windsor Great Park

The Saville Garden: Trees and Lawns

The Saville Garden: Trees and Lawns

The Saville Garden: Secret Camillias

The Saville Garden: Secret Camillias

The Saville Garden: a Secret Enclosure

The Saville Garden: a Secret Enclosure

Beth's: Can you Tell the Difference from the Saville Garden?

Beth’s: Can you Tell the Difference from the Saville Garden?

Beth's Grand Vista

Beth’s Grand Vista

Too Late to Change the Inscription Now

Too Late to Change the Inscription Now

Layer Marney Church: Essex's Hidden Gem

Layer Marney Church: Essex’s Hidden Gem

Layer Marney Tower - Unbelievable

Layer Marney Tower – Unbelievable

Layer Marney Tower, Essex. How can It be There?

Layer Marney Tower, Essex. How can It be There?

 

Posted Sunday, May 16, 2021 under Adrian Edge day by day.

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