This article is reprinted from www.favershamlife.org The 2023 Chelsea Fringe Festival will be held from Saturday 20 May to Sunday 28 May and our local events will be held at Doddington Place Gardens,  just outside Faversham. Doddington Place has 10 acres of magnificently planted gardens including a woodland with towering technicolor camellias and rhododendrons, an

All walled gardens undergo a renaissance at some point in their history.   Just such a case is Water Lane near Hawkhurst, Kent.  Its last incarnation was the Walled Nursery (see blog post September 2017).  This wonderfully atmospheric 2 acre walled garden of what was the Tongswood estate is no longer a purveyor of plants but

To visit the intriguingly called ‘No Name Nursery ‘in East Kent is an exhilarating experience. In just three years Steve Edney and his partner Lou Dowle have established a veritable horticultural tour de force.  The scope of the enterprise is astonishing for both its vast range of plants and also for how well established the

The delights of the South London Botanical Institute, based at a Victorian villa on the busy Norwood Road, are myriad.   ‘School children often gasp when they walk into the building. It reminds them of Harry Potter, says Nell Gatehouse, the Administrator.  The Institute has an enchanting garden brimming with more than 500 plants, and has

‘I have 115 different varieties of geums’ says Sue Martin who holds the national collection. The irresistible crinkly papery flowers are available in a wide range of colours from subtle shades of dusky pink to bright orange. ‘They are such useful plants in late spring flowering from February until June and the seed heads are

An attractive dilemma for garden lovers pondering where to go for a staycation is to choose between renting the Wayside Byre at the internationally renowned plant nursery, Marchants  run by Graham Gough and Lucy Goffin in Sussex,or the Potting Shed adjacent to celebrated topiarist Charlotte Molesworth’s magical garden in Kent. Both holiday lets are well

That an extensive 800 year-old garden is hidden just behind Canterbury’s St. Peter’s Street is, I suspect, virtually unknown to the scores of shoppers and tourists strolling along the bustling thoroughfare. The Franciscan Gardens date from 1224 when the first Franciscan Friars to be sent to England by Francis of Assisi arrived in Canterbury. Today

King’s College, Cambridge, has a new energy-efficient development  on Cranmer Road, designed by Allies and Morrison and built to Passivhaus standard, to provide new accommodation for the College’s graduate students.It is a haven of floriferous joy:  an exquisite slate memorial frieze, brimming with flowers designed and carved by the renowned Cardozo Kindersley Workshop, complements the

The last year has witnessed a national surge of interest in gardening and nature and the powerfully therapeutic effect both have on us. Two veritable beacons of joy, amongst all the angst and tribulations of the dreadful Pandemic. Capitalizing on these trends, the enterprising curator and writer Natasha Goodfellow is organising Herbival, an exciting new

Of the many imaginative creative projects that have sprung out of Covid, Maude Smith’s range of tea towels and tiles celebrating the natural world have jumped out at me from Instagram. (@maude_made) The beguiling tea towels have a naïve charm with a particularly English sensibility. Butterflies, grasses, leaves, mushrooms, sheep, birds eggs, British birds, British