Travel Stories: English Gardens Tours (7)

(This is the 7th in a series of blog posts about the English Gardens Tour I led from May 16-27, 2018. Remember that you can click on any photo to view a larger image.)

In my previous post, I wrote about our visit to Wisley Gardens, which was absolutely fantastic. That was on Sunday, May 20th. In the afternoon, we also visited Chartwell House, so I wanted to share a bit of information about this with you before moving on.

There are two Churchill-related sites that I’ve visited in the past, Blenheim Palace and Chartwell House. When I was putting together the itinerary for this recent trip, I chose Chartwell. Why?

To clarify, Blenheim Palace is where Winston Churchill was born. While it’s very opulent and intriguing from a historical point of view, I feel the gardens are less interesting there than they are at Chartwell House. In addition, Chartwell is where Churchill and his family lived, and is so much more historically significant. If we’d had the time, maybe we could have visited both places, but I chose Chartwell for these reasons.

Churchill bought the house in 1922 and lived there until shortly before his death in 1965. The house is filled with mementoes from his time there, which we all got to see during a self-guided tour. What many folks don’t now is that Churchill was a gifted artist. After touring the house, we were able to go inside his studio, see some of his paintings and hear about that part of his life.

I previously visited Chartwell in June 2017 and remember how I spied a wall garden with a door opening into it. At the time, I recall being drawn to it. Once I entered the garden, I was in seventh heaven! That’s because it was the family’s large kitchen garden, which is lovingly tended by a staff of gardeners even today.

I felt much the same way during our recent visit there except for being a bit disappointed that not much of the garden had been planted yet. As our tour escort explained to us, the winter and early spring were quite harsh with wide fluctuations in the temperatures and conditions. So planting was a bit behind this year… well, that and the fact that we were at Chartwell a month earlier than my previous visit. The photo directly below is one from my 2017 visit, just to give you an idea of how marvelous the garden is.

Even so, it was fun walking through the kitchen garden, studying the plants that were growing and seeing the archway in the garden that had been fashioned out of branches. I would love to do something like that in my garden!

Here are some photos (below) that I took during our visit. If you plan to visit England, I heartily recommend a stop at Chartwell House… and the garden, provided it’s in June or later so you can fully appreciate what a magnificent garden it is.

If you’re wondering what the above clay pots are all about, they are placed over rhubarb plants early in the season in order to “blanch” them and make them both flavorful and tender. It’s commonly seen in gardens throughout England, and we’ve seen this at Thomas Jefferson’s garden at Monticello.

The above photo shows the arches in the kitchen garden. Aren’t they cool?

My husband and I were intrigued with the above Japanese Wineberry vine… that is, until my research showed that the seeds take years to germinate and are hard to come by! But it was a cool vine to have in an edible garden.