Letters to garden makers

Dear Monty, You are a garden thinker if ever there was one, this is evident in your writing and in your talks about your writing and your garden. I suppose all this blog writing I do is a kind of thinking out loud, and a way to say I exist outside of my career as a nurse and an attempt to find out if making art and a garden makes a difference for good in this sometimes tortured human world. I love looking at other peoples gardens both in the vegetative flesh and in digital pictures on line. I write specifically to you because much to the chagrin of others in the category of those who think about and meditate on the concept of gardens - you are the fist 'virtual' person who most inspired me to have a go before I met up with others who have made and are making insightful gardens. These people I can actually have conversations with face to face. There is ego involved - I seem to need approval and I know this is almost anti-creative in spirit. I often just wonder wh

Dear Monty, Longmeadow looked colourful in GW last night. Perhaps I dreamt it, but I thought you mentioned the June Gap. Should this make me rush out and buy colourful flowering plants to fill in this lull of colour in my garden (other than greens and plumbs, yellows and blues, purples, oranges and reds in foliage) or just celebrate the gap ? This life is so full of noise - sometimes colour can be noisy. I found great refreshing in the concept of finding gardens everywhere, they can be found in nature as demonstrated by the garden in Windermere shown on GW recently, and found in the landscape of the Lake District itself. I even found beauty this very morning in the damp Diamond Park, a restored former coal tip on the other side of this valley. I believe we can over stuff our spaces, and then they begin to loose their sense of rest. Gaps in florifluousness occur naturally, there are subtle seasons and in the subtlety is beauty.

Dear Monty, Here is the final instalment of this tour with dog. If only we were all hardy perennials in a beautiful garden. Day 10 We trundled up north over mountains and down to Ullswater and on to Dalemain. Ullswater was wordless - Wordsworth had words I have none. Dalemain  www.dalemain.com I thoroughly enjoyed Dalemain , It is of course set in its landscaped garden with view out toward the hills carefully choreographed. It respects its landscape and is structured but not overly styled or gardened to within an inch of its life like Levens. It has smaller gardens to its side which have been allowed to develop and there are beautifully managed 'wild' areas. The stumpery and the wild garden next to the river - had a feeling of intimacy and individuality which was much stronger here. I gained encouragement as an amateur from seeing how plants were used, and I could see links with my own gard