Creating A Rhythm

Your eye is taken by wave after wave of fluffy astilbes in the ‘Leonard Messel’ garden

Several places in the garden here at Glebe Cottage have specific names but the next area we come to on our conducted tour is referred to by several epithets. Sometimes it’s ‘the bed below Annie’s garden’ or ‘the big bed just before you get to the oak fence’ but for our purposes, and from now on, perhaps it ought to be ‘the ‘Leonard Messel’ garden’.

Though this garden is full of herbaceous plants and bulbs, its most outstanding feature is the magnolia ‘Leonard Messel’. It’s grown into a sizeable tree now and its branches are smothered in their starry pink cups in late April, visible even from the house. It stands on the west side of broad slate steps that take you from the path below Annie’s garden to a lower path which runs from the track to the field edge, en route to another path which leads up the garden close to the native hedge.