June 24 Column: Great Dixter
I’m really excited about today’s garden column because it is a profile of Great Dixter. If you’ve never heard of this amazing English garden, you will definitely want to put it on your bucket list! It was one of our stops on the English Gardens Tour that I led from May 16-27, 2018.
Here is a link to the column in today’s edition of The Spokesman-Review. Visit to iconic Great Dixter beat gardener’s high expectations. (or you can read my column lower in this post.)
Great Dixter was the family home (and garden) of Christopher Lloyd, a prolific writer and garden designer.
What I loved about Great Dixter
I especially loved seeing the wild combinations of flower and foliage colors in the garden beds at Great Dixter. They are all very appealing, but that style wasn’t always in favor with gardeners.
In Lloyd’s heyday, a “proper” English garden had flowers of like hues planted together. We’re talking whites, purples, blues and pinks. Not garish reds, oranges and yellows mixed in with those other colors. Perish the thought!
I hope you’ll enjoy hearing about Great Dixter and that you’ll have the opportunity to visit it at some point. It is fantastic!
Note: On my blog tomorrow, I will continue posting about the gardens we visited during my recent English Gardens Tour. And I’ll start with more photos of Great Dixter before discussing our visit to Gravetye Manor and Gardens. Be sure to check it out!
Great Dixter garden column:
By Susan Mulvihill
There is something very special about seeing a garden in person after decades of reading about it. Such was the case with my visit to Great Dixter last month.
I recently led a group to tour some of the finest gardens in England. Over the course of 11 days, we visited Sissinghurst Castle Garden, Hidcote, Kew Gardens and Waterperry Gardens. And many others, of course. As much as I enjoyed all of the other gardens, Great Dixter had an emotional impact on me. Maybe it was just the fact that I was finally standing in front of that iconic house and exuberant garden.
Background on Great Dixter and the iconic Christopher Lloyd:
To clarify, Great Dixter is both a house and a garden. It’s located in Northiam, East Sussex. The house is a blend of three houses. The original is a mid-15th-century timbered building. In 1910, a 16th-century house was moved to the site and, in 1912, additional construction finally married the two homes.
Many gardeners have heard of Great Dixter because of its most famous resident, Christopher Lloyd. His father purchased the house in 1910. Christopher was the youngest of six children. He and his mother, Daisy, both shared a lifelong passion for gardening.
Christopher Lloyd lived from 1921 to 2006 and spent the majority of his life at Great Dixter. Well-known as a writer, Lloyd was often considered very controversial. That especially applied toh his landscape design techniques involving combinations of diverse colors in his flower beds.
After a private tour of the house, our tour group was turned loose to explore the gardens. They completely lived up to my expectations.
The highlist: touring the gardens!
The gardens are concentrated around the house. They include a sunken garden, walled garden, topiary lawn, long border, an exotic garden, and a vegetable garden.
Wandering through all of these areas was an adventure. One never knew what would be around the corner or through an opening in the many clipped yew hedges. I almost wanted to run with abandon from one area to the next. I actually felt giddy about being at Great Dixter. Fortunately, my desire to savor every square inch led to a very memorable visit.
My tour group and I fell in love with the eye-popping red Ladybird poppies gracing many of the beds. Others included Purple Sensation alliums, bicolor lupines, dame’s rocket (Hesperis matronalis), hardy Jerusalem sage (Phlomis russeliana), single white tree peonies, and meadow rue (Thalictrum).
There’s a wonderful shop for purchasing garden-related items to bring back home. They also have a nursery filled with a mix of familiar plants and many plant cultivars I’d never seen before. We somehow resisted the temptation of trying to sneak plants back home. That’s something the U.S. Customs officers would most definitely frown upon.
All in all, our visit to Great Dixter brought the garden alive for those of us. It is a must-see garden for any English gardens tour itinerary.
Learn more about Great Dixter:
- Visit Great Dixter’s website at greatdixter.co.uk.
- Christopher Lloyd’s book, The Well-Tempered Garden, gives a lot of insight into Lloyd’s views on gardening. It can be ordered from online sources.
- Watch the excellent, multiple-part program about Christopher Lloyd and Great Dixter, entitled “Gardener Provocateur.”
And now for this week’s video, which is about drip irrigation:
As I promised in the video, here is some additional information on drip irrigation that might be helpful for you. Let’s start with some previous blog posts I’ve written on the topic:
New drip irrigation system (July 12, 2013)
Drip irrigation project, part one (Apr. 17, 2014)
Drip irrigation project, part two (Apr. 17, 2014)
We’ve purchased most of our supplies through Dripworks, which is a national online company. They’ve been very reliable and helpful, and they stock just about every kind of irrigation part you can think of. You can request a catalog from them. They have lots of resources (see bottom of home page) to help you plan out your project.
Remember that you probably have sprinkler supply businesses in the city where you live. They are a great resource as well. In Spokane, we have purchased supplies from Auto-Rain. Friends or acquaintances who have installed drip irrigation systems in their own gardens are a valuable resource.
And last but not least, your local Master Gardener program should have information for you. There might be Master Gardeners who give talks on the subject and can provide you with reliable information. To find the Master Gardener program in your state or province, check out this website.