Somerset Journal
Wednesday, February 28th, 2007January 2007
Media Coverage
Tim Richardson - Garden Design Journal February 2007
Tuesday, January 16th, 2007Garden Design Journal February 2007
Tuesday, January 16th, 2007Garden Prospects
Mary Keen - The Spectator November 2006
Thursday, November 16th, 2006Aspiration. Aspiration. Aspiration is still the watchword for publishers of gardening books. How many heavy, glossy productions filled with Get- the- Look pictures does the average gardener need? Especially when what is always peddled and praised tends to emphasise the Haute Couture of horticulture. There is a fashionable tendency to over- intellectualise about design. This is not what gardening is about. If you want more of this argument log onto www.thehadspenparabola.com , a website for the competition to re-design the walled garden at Hadspen, where there is some good online reading to be had. Victoria Glendinning is down to earth ‘This is all gardens-in-the-head, not about real gardens and still less about making a garden’. Penelope Hobhouse reproves her son, who set up the site, I think YOU, Niall, miss out on a lot by not digging, mulching, pruning …..all the tasks which Victoria G. enjoys !’, but in her latest book, Hobhouse provides another lofty overview of world horticulture. In Search of Paradise. Great Gardens of the World (Frances Lincoln £25) contains her assessment of what will last, in page after page of enormous projects. It is a personal view of Important gardens. Spades get no mention. Jellicoe and Helen Dillon, surprisingly do not appear,but there is plenty of Jencks and a good clutch of adventurous designers like Caruncho, Burle Marx and Christopher Bradley Hole. The only page that made me want to linger was the park at Chatsworth, but for those who like an armchair trip to gardens they may never visit, for people who never get their hands dirty, this book could be the ticket.
Article in Horticulture Week
Thursday, November 16th, 2006
Article in November issue of The Garden - RHS Journal
Wednesday, November 1st, 2006Design competition
Hadspen is in your hands
Professional and amateur gardeners are being invited to enter a competition to redesign the parabola-shaped walled garden at Hadspen Gardens, near Yeovil, Somerset.
The gardens have been in limbo following the departure last year of Canadian gardeners Sandra and Nori Pope. Since 1986 the couple had transformed the Upper Garden with entirely new planting schemes using more unusual plants, and many that they raised and named themselves, such as Astrantia ‘Hadspen Blood’ and Dicentra spectabilis ‘Gold Heart’.
Now owner Niall Hobhouse (son of gardener Penelope Hobhouse) plans to give Hadspen, ‘a landmark garden that will provide a platform on which the evolution of planting style can continue to be explored’. He is inviting all-comers to submit designs for the gardens. Details of the competition are due to be posted on Hadspen’s website before Christmas.
Niall said, ‘This is all about finding a new way to make a garden with a design competition squarely aimed at plantsmen and gardeners. They don’t usually get the look-in they deserve. The winner has to be bold, but he or she gets a job of planting the garden they have dreamed of.’
To ensure all entrants have a fair chance and that reputation does not prejudice the judging, submissions will be anonymous. The gardens will be open for two or three days in spring for potential entrants to visit.
Penelope has recently replanted the Lower Garden and the parkland. She lived at Hadspen until 1979, restoring and enlarging the earlier garden, the subject of her first book, The Country Gardener in 1976.
Niall hopes to maintain an established and successful nursery next to the garden but ‘essential investment’ is necessary.
www.rhs.org.uk
Building Design Article Published October 2006
Friday, October 20th, 2006Article in Gardens Illustrated October 2006
Sunday, October 1st, 2006Daily Telegraph Article about Hadspen Parabola by Mary Keen
Saturday, August 5th, 2006