Department
Garden Visits
Beth Chatto's gravel garden, a year in residence at Great Dixter, one small farm in Sonoma, a Tokyo apartment-balcony garden.
The Medicinal Garden at Cluain na bPlandaí
On a half-acre in west Clare, an Irish herbalist tends a garden of three hundred medicinal plants, most of them native, in beds laid out by traditional use.
The Perennial Trial Beds at Bressingham
In a working corner of the Bressingham Gardens in Norfolk, the family that ran Britain's most influential perennial nursery for half a century still trials new cultivars, quietly.
An Allotment in Walthamstow
Plot 47A at the South Grove Allotment Society in east London has been worked by the same family since 1973, and is now in the hands of its third gardener.
The Monastery Garden at Clonfert
Behind a Cistercian wall in east Galway, three brothers and one lay sister grow a year's worth of vegetables on roughly half an acre, and have done since 1971.
Twenty-Six Square Feet in Shimokitazawa
On a third-floor balcony in west Tokyo, a translator grows seventeen herbs, three tomatoes, and a single fig tree, and considers what a garden owes its keeper.
A Small Farm Near Petaluma
On three acres in west Sonoma County, a former restaurant cook and her husband grow cut flowers, salad greens, and the kind of tomatoes that do not travel well.
Twelve Months at Great Dixter
A Wintergreen contributor spent a year on the gardening staff at Great Dixter in East Sussex, and came home with a notebook of weather, failures, and one very good salad burnet.
An Afternoon at Beth Chatto's Gravel Garden
In late May the Elmstead Market beds are at their driest and most generous, and the lessons in the gravel still read clearly thirty-five years on.