Heading home....

Well, it's been a long and wandering journey these past several months, but enjoyable almost every step alone the way!  We just successfully finished our "test-to-fly" COVID check, and are all set to fly out tomorrow morning :-) This past week has been another spent walking, cycling, visiting gardens, and generally wandering around interesting towns & villages.  We visited several of our favorite gardens, (Elsing Hall and Helmingham Hall gardens), Scott cycled his longest ride of the trip (72 miles out to the North Sea coast), and we spent a day geeking out in Cambridge poking our noses into various university quadrangles- very cool!

And tomorrow, we'll be back at home in Cazenovia (fingers crossed!)  So... here's a final collection of photos from the last week or so!

Chartwell House, home of Winston Churchill

Snape Malting mills & salt marshes

Helmingham Hall & Garden

one of 32 colleges at Cambridge...

Elsing Hall

QE's "holiday house" at Sandringham

...and some amazing bluebells woodlands!

Cheers!

Back to Kent & Sussex...

After nearly 4 weeks in England's West country, this week brought us back to the South East of London. Along the way, we had a brief but really nice visit with one of Norma's friends from back in Riverside who has lived the past 30+ years in the UK. Afterwards, we dropped our rental car off at one vender, and picked up a new one at another to last the remainder of our time; ...enabling us to avoid the 30 day collision damage insurance limits on our credit card coverage :-)

Our latest VRBO rental is in Broadoak, just north of the coastal village of Rye. This place is a classic "granny flat" conversion of the second story of their old barn- nice & cosy with lots of room!  

As with all our UK travels, we're getting out pretty much every day to visit some great gardens or wander local market towns & villages.  This week's highlight was a visit to Gravetye Manor, the former home & garden of late 19th century garden designer William Robinson, one of my biggest influences.  The manor is currently being operated as a luxury hotel, with a Michelin starred restaurant... and the only way to access the garden, is to spend a night in the hotel (starting at approximately $900/night!), or dining at the restaurant.  Seeing as our week's rate at our VRBO was (substantially!) less than one night, we opted to have lunch to get our opportunity to see the garden.  While not cheap, their prix fixe lunch was no more than a nice restaurant at home in NYC or DC.  We came in with pretty low expectations, given that we've never been to a restaurant that had actually earned a Michelin star, and while I'd read that the garden had been meticulously restored to Robinson's original plan over the past 30;years, you never really know until you get there! When did, we were absolutely blown away! The garden was magnificent, with wonderful layering of naturalized spring bulbs, perennials, and trees and shrubs.

And the food was even more of a delightful surprise-- including a rubarb souffle for dessert that had Norma swooning :-)

Other gardens this past week have included a second visit to Sissinghurst, the Great Dixter, Hole Park, and tomorrow we're off to Hever Castle, childhood home to Anne Boleyn (Henry VIII's #2 wife), as well William Waldorf Astor, the American millionaire who spent millions creating the current iteration of the house & extensive gardens. Our most notable village explorations included Rye (with cider at England's oldest pub:-), and Hastings on the coast. Rye in particular was very cool!  Here's a quick collection of pictures that capture some of the last week's adventures ;-)

Thats all for now...

Cheer!

...on to South Devon & Dorset

After nearly 3 weeks of wandering around the English countryside touring gardens, they are beginning to blend together as a blur!  Last week we visited several interesting ones, and even more this week, but the big change has been improving weather, so I've finally gotten my bike out again, and begun riding around on the crazy English roads.

Riding on the UK isn't terribly different than Spain, or even the US, especially as the drivers here are quite courteous... But the roads are all about 30-50% narrower than anyplace I've ever been!  Primary highways ("A" level roads) are strictly 2 lanes (roughly 20-22' total), with no shoulder (a paint strip, then nothing, zip, nada... Minor highways  ("B" roads) are more like 1.5 lanes (about 12'-15' total). On minor rural roads (no letter or number designation, and often no name!), it's no more than one lane, often just 6-8' of pavement, with no shoulder, just a hedge on both sides running vertically up 8-15' high. 

On similar rural roads I spend most of my time on in upstate NY,  they are a full two lanes of 12' each, plus a rough or soft shoulder if needed.  The countryside here is like riding through a postcard from the mid 19th century... Gorgeous, but often nerve wracking in a car- on a bike, however, they are really pretty nice, as cars cannot travel at much more than 20mph safely!  

Consequently, off the main roads, there is essentially no traffic.  I've ridden about 100 miles now on these tiny roads, and probably encountered fewer than 25 cars in total. I've seen more cows and sheep on these roads than cars (which is another reason the cars tend to go slowly!So...  I do all I can to stay off the main roads!

The other thing we've been up to is lots of walking.  Norma and I are averaging about 25-30 miles per week, as there are public "footpaths" through our the countryside all over. The coastal paths cover some fantastic areas, but almost every town has walks extending our into the farmland too. We've really been enjoying that!

So... Here's a few more pics from the last week to catch up!

Cheers-

Its spring!

Lambing season too...

carpets of woodland bluebells...

Ammonites on the Jerassic coast...

Exeter Cathedral on a warm sunny day...

the "Pilgrim Steps" in Plymouth...

...and lots of curious cows!

A Week in Cornwall

I've discovered that I love Cornish pasties!  ...and that's just the tip of the iceberg in terms of all the things we're enjoying here in England's southwest. After getting our bearings on arrival in the UK the last week in March, we've spent this week exploring Cornwall, visiting several remarkable gardens in old country estates, as well as taken some fantastic walks along the coastal cliffs and coves traced by the National Trust's South West Coastal Path. 

We started our week with a visit to Trebah, one of the most noted gardens in Cornwall due to it's location in a deep, protected valley along the South coast. Because of its remarkable microclimate, subtropical plants like palms and tree ferns thrive here, and the tender camellias and rhododendrons grow like weeds. While I can't say the design of the place was much to my liking, the shear abundance of spectacular plants, many in full bloom, was well worth the visit-- truly a "plantsman's" garden!

The next day we drove over to Marazion, near Penzance, and visited Saint Michael's Mount, a 12th century fortified Abby turned to a private "castle" home of a local aristocrat after Henry VIII's confiscation of the Catholic church's properties (following his excommunication by the pope over his propensity for discarding wives via divorce!). Originally developed by monks from the same order (Benedictine) as those who built Mont St. Michel across the English Channel in Normandy, the place clearly borrowed many of the same ideas in design, taking advantage of the local topography of a small, rocky island, separated from the mainland at high tide by only about 300 yards.

At high tide, one needs a ferry to access the island, so we waited until low tide to walk across the causeway that connects to the mainland for 3-4 hours each tidal cycle. With tides along this part of the coast fluctuating by more than 10', and local currents being treacherous, it's pretty obvious why the site makes such a great place for a defensive stronghold! 

The more recent history of the castle is not so much defensive as it is a retreat for the still resident aristocratic family and their staff, most of whom have inhabitanted the small village on the island for generations. The whole place is now managed in partnership with the National Trust, and includes some really interesting gardens terraced into the cliffs below the castle.

On the way back to our cottage, we also stopped at another local landmark of the Cornish industrial aristocracy of the 16th-18th century, Godolphin house. The family who built the house we're among the wealthiest in all of Cornwall during this period, based on a collection of mines and industrial processing facilities producing tin, copper, lead, silver, and other metals, as well as founderies and factories making use of the raw material for use and sale across the rapidly expanding British empire. Sadly, at the beginning of the 19th century, the last male heir passed on his estate and holdings to a family in the Midlands, who wanted nothing to do with a huge old house out in the hinterlands of Cornwall.  On the intervening years of neglect, almost 75% of the house was dismantled and used to build barns and other outbuildings for tennant farmers renting the surrounding lands. The remains of the house and a remarkable set of gardens dating more than 500 years were all but abandoned until acquired by the National Trust about 20 years ago!

Next up, we took a fairly long drive to another visit another National Trust property a bit to the east in central Cornwall, Lanhydrock House & Garden.  We originally picked this place out to visit because of its late Victorian interior, due to the house's reconstruction following a fire in 1881, and rebuilt with interiors of high English Arts and Crafts designs. With the weather continuing to be typically English (periods of rain, wind, etc., with 5-10 minutes of bright sunshine every couple of hours just to tease you!!), spending some time wandering around a big old house sounded like a good idea.  Our house at home in Cazenovia is all designed in American Arts and Crafts styles, so we thought we might enjoy seeing something of that style's European inspiration... 

Oddly enough, other than some really gorgeous William Morris wall paper, the most impressive aspect of the interior design was the huge kitchen that clearly was designed to feed and  entertain vast numbers of visiting guests, with all of the latest in technologies and gadgets of the time-- almost "steam-punk" in their range of mechanical  cleverness!

In addition to the interior, the garden proved to be pretty interesting too, and even the weather gave us enough patches of sun between rain squalls to enjoy it!

Another rainy day led us to then visit the local museum in Penzance and a tour of the collection of paintings by artists of the Newlyn School (a late 19th century group of painters very much working in a style reminiscent of Winslow Homer in the USA). We really enjoyed our visit, and the artwork, particularly of Cornish villages and waterfronts was very inspiring! Lots of ideas for new sketches... :-)

After visiting the museum, we took advantage of a clearing on the weather to visit one last local garden just outside of Penzance, Trengwainton Garden, featuring the very nice pond and bridge below, as well as an exceptional naturally planted small stream course...

On our last day in Cornwall, we decided to spend the day wandering along the South West Coastal Path again, taking in the segment between Lizard Point and Kynance Cove.  It's very reminiscent of my bike tour down the north west coast of Oregon and California last summer- each time you round a headland, the view is more spectacular than the last!

Now we're off for Devon to a new base in a little town called Chittlehampton, just outside Exmoor National Park...

Cheers!