Garden Days Out

Garden Days out – Kingston Bagpuize House, Oxfordshire

More than 3000 private gardens in the UK open each year to the public under the National Gardens Scheme (NGS) charity. Many more visitors have gained pleasure wandering around these gardens, getting inspiration to take back home, enjoying afternoon tea and perhaps buying a few plants. Charities such as Macmillan Cancer Relief and Marie Curie Cancer Care and others have received £15 million from these garden openings over the last 10 years.

As a recent enthusiast of the NGS, my first garden visit for 2006 was Kingston Bagpuize House, near Abringdon in Oxfordshire. Still in the throes of a long cold winter, the signs of Spring were only just beginning to appear, but there was nonetheless plenty to make the visit worthwhile. Kingston Bagpuize offers the visitor a good deal more than just a garden to look around.

There are guided tours of the house which dates back to the 17th century, stable courtyard with granary, stables, dairy and malt house, a walled garden where unusual herbs and lavenders are grown and sold, a woodland garden, a terrace walk, an early 18th century pavilion, a garden park and shrub border. The gardens here are large but not overly formal and there was a very relaxed feeling to the whole place. Adults and children are able to wander freely in the garden and noone batted an eyelid when one family wheeled a pushchair across the lawn to the front of the house.

Of particular interest in mid March when I visited were the snowdrops. There are over 40 varieties of snowdrops in this garden; my young children were fascinated by the many different types to be found in the woodland garden, church copse and the park areas. It took all my effort to stop them picking them! There were also signs of hellebores and narcissi preparing for the long awaited Spring.

Although parts of the garden date back 300 years, the greatest influence on the present garden was Marlie Raphael who in the 1950s added the woodland garden and a shrub border in the garden park area, planting many unusual species designed to give year round interest. Since the mid 1990s the present owners have been restoring the gardens and planting new trees, shrubs and perennials. This is the sort of garden that you need to visit several times in the year to get the most out of the changing seasons and the huge variety of unusual plants and trees.

The pavilion and raised terrace walk were other fascinating features. Although built more recently than the house, the brick two-storey pavilion has internal paneling and windows that are similar to those found in the house. The first floor room is reached by a narrow, curved stone staircase, has an antique fireplace and is painted in a vintage pale blue. It’s a room that is a blank canvas where you can imagine a fashion or interiors shoot for a magazine. The pavilion leads to a lovely raised terrace where we admired the house and original gardens to the front in all their glory.

A cold, but gloriously sunny Spring afternoon made this house and garden a truly delightful visit and the £3 admission charge was extremely good value (garden only; £5 if you want to go into the house as well, children go free, but house is not recommended for children under 5 years). Of course we couldn’t leave without a trip to the tearoom in the original basement kitchen of the house – and we weren’t disappointed with the home made cakes and biscuits.

Kingston Bagpuize House, Kinston Bagpuize, Near Abingdon, Oxfordshire

Aeration

As in the Spring, your lawn will benefit from aeration. This process punches soil into the ground so allowing air to pass into the soil and therefore encourage bacterial activity and encouraging root development.

www.kingstonbagpuizehouse.org.uk

For other information on other NGS gardens, visit www.nationalgardensscheme.org or purchase their Yellow Book 2006 from good bookshops for full details of all gardens and opening dates.