The Duchess and Her Garden – NYTimes.com

• “THE criticism I’ve had is just massive,” said the Duchess of Northumberland, as she led a visitor through the Bamboo Labyrinth of Alnwick Garden. “It’s really staggering the way that Britain views this project. They said I am to gardens what Imelda Marcos is to shoes.”
• what she has done with these 14 acres at Alnwick Castle, her husband’s ancestral home — and what she hopes to do with them in the future, and the money that all this involves — has indeed stirred controversy, in worlds as diverse as the English gardening establishment, the British Parliament and the press. What started as a whim of the new duchess, who saw a chance to create a modern counterpoint to the adjacent 18th-century landscape designed by Lancelot (Capability) Brown, has become one of the most ambitious public gardens created in Europe since World War II, a rollicking tourist attraction widely known as the Versailles of the North.
• “In England, if you’re married to a duke and raise your head above the parapet and do something on this scale, it’s considered to be overly ambitious,” she said. “The attitude is that you should stay in your castle.”

• “To do anything,” she told the duke, “I’m going to need a million pounds.” But over the next year, her vision became grander, expanding to encompass a public garden that would draw visitors from all over the country. The duke eventually put in £8 million (about $12 million at the time) through his charitable trust, half in the form of a loan, and the duchess embarked on a fund-raising campaign that is still ongoing.

  She also became increasingly determined that the garden should be modern, not a recreation of Alnwick’s long-derelict 18th- and 19th-century gardens — a decision, she said, that would lead to the first of her troubles.

Open Garden Squares Weekend is Bliss for Voyeurs : TreeHugger

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  by Bonnie Alter, London on 06.10.08

   

   

  Food & Health (botanical)

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• Open Garden Squares is the one weekend in the year when people can visit London gardens not usually open to the public and discover all sorts of hidden, unknown squares and patches of green that are privately owned. Due to a peculiarity of English architecture, many houses back on to large communal gardens which are completely surrounded by the buildings and only accessible to the owners.

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gardenhistorygirl

• The Elizabethan Snail Mount

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• The viewing mount at the Garden of Cosmic Speculation (see previous post) is of particularly illustrious ancestry, being a type favored by the Elizabethans who conferred upon it a typically emblematic meaning.

  Sir Francis Bacon’s garden (c. 1620) had ‘in the very middle, a fair mount, with three ascents, and alleys, enough for four to walk abreast; which I would have to be perfect circles…and the whole mount to be thirty foot high’

  A mount of this height had to be ascended by stairs (expensive) or by circular spiralling paths (cheaper), leading to the name ‘snail mounts’.

  The best surviving example, shown above, is at Lyveden New Bield in Northamptonshire, where twin snail mounds arise from a moated landscape surrounding Thomas Tresham’s haunting, never-finished Trinitarian retreat.

  (Highly recommended for a visit as one of the most intact Tudor landscapes.)

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Treetop walkway at Kew Gardens | Travel | guardian.co.uk

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• Treetop walkway at Kew Gardens (9 pictures)

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• Thumbnail view

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  Stairway to heaven for tree lovers at Kew gardens

  One hundred and eight steps up, tree top walk way provides new striking view of Londo

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  The 200m-long walkway was designed by the architects of the London Eye

• Photograph: Linda Nylind