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 of gardens to visit! 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.

Great Dixter was the family home (and garden) of Christopher Lloyd, a prolific writer and garden designer.

I especially loved seeing the wild combinations of flower and foliage colors in the garden beds and garden “rooms” 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 my series of posts 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!

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 and 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. And if you have friends or acquaintances who have installed drip irrigation systems in their own gardens, they are a valuable resource.

And last but not least, your local Master Gardener program should have information for you. There might even be a few 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.