Rockcliffe Garden

Let’s continue with Day #2 of our Garden Tour. It only gets better!
Our first stop was
Rockcliffe Garden

Rockcliffe is superb. It has been the home of Emma and Simon Keswick for 30 years and in those years they have transformed the grounds. What you see below, a gorgeous terrace, had been a front driveway.

Below are just a few of the many scenes from our tour:

Here, the man of the hour, Head Gardener at Rockcliffe, Thomas Unterdorfer who patiently
answered all our questions, explained the Keswick’s ideas for the evolution of this estate, and made us welcome in these gorgeous gardens with the variety of plantings, the borders, the lily pond, the pool house, the vegetable garden, the dovecote. I found it a very personal kind of garden. It spoke to so many aspects of gardening: the color combinations, or in some cases the reliance of one color in an entire garden area, the flow between areas and even the negative space.  It was, obviously, very well cared for but also there was a kind of abandon that was so appealing. It was, if not my favorite, among my top three of the week.

The sheer scale of these estate […]