Author: Sarah Salway
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Reading and Writing … at the Chelsea Fringe
I’m delighted to be – virtually – taking part in the exciting Chelsea Fringe Festival this year. I’ll be posting from a selection of London gardens and parks – some well-known, some you may have overlooked – with photographs, a little bit of gossip, and for each one, I want to offer you a poem…
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Villa Gamberaia, Florence
Although Villa Gamberaia is outside Florence (a 30 minute No 10 bus ride from San Marco Square), it has been designed so the view of the city becomes part of the garden itself. It’s a garden that has been much written about, ‘Nowhere else in my recollection have the liquid and solid been blended with…
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Boboli Gardens, Florence
Our second Florence garden was the Boboli Gardens, just behind the Pitti Palace. Originally built for the Medici Family, and constructed on a hill once covered with olive trees and vineyards, it still retains an air of a perfect Italian classic design although apparently… ‘During the brief period of French rule, the Boboli gardens ran…
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The Road Not Taken
One summer about five years ago, the council changed the layout of paths in my local park. Perhaps cowed by the fact that they had been so properly laid out and surfaced, we kept to the new paths and changed our normal routes through to town. All of us that is but the daffodils who…
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Creative Writing for Garden Lovers
Visiting gardens for creative inspiration has been one of my greatest pleasures over the last few years, as witnessed by this website! And so I’m really pleased to see this fantastic initiative launched by the You Grow Girl community. The first prompt by Gayla Trail is to write about your first plant – Michelle Chapman has written…
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West Dean, Chichester
The gardens at West Dean have a traditionally English feel to them. But as wide and expansive as they are, particularly when you walk up through the St Roches arboretum to see Edward James’s grave and look back at the house… … it’s impossible not to sense the magic running through this estate. It’s as…
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Five Woodland Walks
1. Every Sunday afternoon the family goes to the woods. ‘But doesn’t Mum want to come?’ It seems not. Besides she’d spoil the fun by getting nervous as you balance like an underage drunk, a tightrope walker tottering along fallen tree trunks to collect that coin Dad puts out to tempt you on to the…
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A walk in the woods – textiles, photograph and poetry
I’m very happy to be part of this exhibition in Crowborough – it’s on until 6th February, but if you around on Saturday 26th January and fancy joining Anne Kelly, John Morrison and me for a drink and a chat, we will be there from 10-1pm. More details of the Exhibition here. But in the…
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Longing in the Garden
One of the highlights of the Nude Men exhibition we saw at the Leopold Museum was a series of self-portraits by an artist I’d never heard of before, Richard Gerstl. And then further up the gallery, I came across this painting, also by Gerstl, and simply titled, Mathilde in the Garden. This time it wasn’t…
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Crossbones Garden of Remembrance, London
I was taking a short cut to Borough Market when I came across these gates above in Redcross Way. I’d thought they might be an art installation at first, but then read some of the inscriptions, and knew I wanted to research further. The Crossbones Cemetery was originally an unconsecrated burial site for prostitutes (aka…
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Not such new news – GMGA New Talent Finalist 2012
Forget tomorrow’s BBC Sports Personality of the Year, I’ve just realised I haven’t yet posted anything on here about this website’s exciting placing as a finalist in the Garden Media Guild Awards New Talent category. New talent!!! Of course, it’s not a normal talent contest – I didn’t have to sing or tap dance (luckily)…
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Quebec House, Westerham
I was attracted to Quebec House, the childhood home of General James Wolfe, not by wanting to find more about the ‘conqueror of Quebec’ but because the National Trust are currently re-doing the small vegetable garden (actually just a strip) with the flowers and vegetables General Wolfe’s mother would have grown in the 1730s. Many…