Bruce Douglas Reeves, Author

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Picture Perfect Lamb House & Garden, Rye

6/26/2015

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Two of the most enjoyable days during our recent trip to the gardens of southern England were spent in the ancient hilltop village of Rye on the East Sussex coast.  Under two hours by train from St. Pancras station in London, Rye’s cobblestone streets took us past several centuries of houses and buildings to the 500 year old Mermaid Inn, a half-timbered pair of buildings rebuilt in 1420, after surviving smugglers and invaders.  From there we could easily explore the whole village, from its surviving medieval towers and castle overlooking the countryside and English Channel to the Norman St. Mary’s Church and old graveyard to the historic High Street,  crowded with tiny shops, tea rooms, and antique stores.

One of the most interesting sights in Rye is the 18th century house built by James Lamb, later lived in by several famous writers, and managed since 1950 by the British National Trust.  The two story red brick house, just around the corner from our hotel, was where Henry James lived between 1898 and 1916 and wrote some of his finest novels, including The Golden Bowl.  After he left Rye, his friend E.F. Benson, author of the popular Mapp and Lucia novels, moved into Lamb House, followed later by the prolific writer Rumer Godden.  From the narrow cobblestone street, Lamb House looks quite plain and austere, but when you pass through the house you discover a large walled garden that was much loved by the writers who lived there.

A glass conservatory once led into the garden from the room where James did much of his writing, but a World War Two bomb destroyed it.  The rest of the house and the garden managed to survive both that blast and the war, despite the village’s strategic location on its hill by the channel.  Meandering paths lead through the spacious rectangular garden, under trees and across lawns and among a variety of flower beds.  Some afternoons, tea is served at small tables in the garden.  

Designed by a friend of Henry James, the garden looks today much as it did in James’ time.  Vines climb the brick walls, roses, lilies, spring bulbs, and herbaceous borders frame the lawn and set off the old house.  The protective brick walls, trees, and shrubs give the garden a peaceful, comfortable feeling.  It’s easy to imagine sitting at one of the wrought iron tables or on one of the benches under a tree, writing or just relaxing.  Although not as grand or spectacular as the other gardens we visited on this trip, we also could picture ourselves caring for this garden.

Fans of the Mapp and Lucia books can walk through the downstairs rooms of the house open to the public and in the garden, imagining that they are at Mallards, E. F. Benson’s recreation of Lamb House and garden.  Recently, a new television series based on the books was filmed at Lamb House and garden and other locations in Rye village.


Bruce Douglas Reeves, Author of DELPHINE, winner of the Clay Reynolds
Novella Competition published by Texas Review Press.   



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Rooms and Rooms of Flowers at Hidcote Manor

6/15/2015

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Just beyond the golden walls, high gables, and ornate chimneys of the 17th century English manor house at Hidcote, we confronted a maze of secret gardens.  To explore them, we had to make our way through and around tall hedges, brick garden walls, rows of carefully pruned trees, brick and gravel walkways and paths, flights of steps leading up and down, and arched entrances and open gates.  The famous garden “rooms” at Hidcote Manor turned out to be not so easy to casually wander through.  Fortunately, we had a beautiful day in which to do it. 

One of England’s most famous gardens, Hidcote could be described as organized confusion.  At first, the many exterior garden “rooms” seem to be unrelated to each other, each with its own theme and color and planting schemes.  We’d pass through an arch cut into a yew hedge or through a wrought iron gate and say to ourselves, Ah, this must be the Fuchsia Garden or the Poppy Garden or the Long Walk.  Wait a minute, is this the Alpine Garden or…?  Although, we preferred some of these enclosed gardens to others and some had yet to reach their seasonal peak, we found something to admire in each of them. 

Gradually, we came to understand that these different growing spaces were designed to slowly unfold, “revealing,” as their creator, Lawrence Johnston, said, “a different atmosphere or new vista at every turn.”  In the words of today, we just had to go with the flow.  Exploring was part of the pleasure.  This was quire a different experience than in the other gardens we’d been visiting on this trip--gardens that seemed to hang together in a much more logical way.  Since we couldn’t see from one “room” to the other, we couldn’t see at a glance how they related to each other.  Or if they even did. 

Some of the gardens reflected Johnston’s time in Italy and France, rather formal and structured, but others suggested a more casual traditional English approach, with their lush, abundant plantings and borders blending together like flowers woven on a tapestry.  We picked up a number of different gardening ideas from the gardens at Hidcote, but they didn’t necessarily relate to each other.  We’ll have to discover later if  they will even work in our smaller Berkeley garden.

Bruce Douglas Reeves,
author, DELPHINE, winner
of the Clay Reynolds Novella Contest

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Stourhead Garden, England

6/9/2015

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Stourhead was very different from the gardens we visited earlier on this trip.   A bride and groom with their photographer posing on a stone bridge, kids rolling down a grassy hill, waddling ducks and preening swans by the edge of a lake, picnicking couples on the grass, young women pushing strollers along meandering paths: this could’ve been almost any large public park in the world, but we were at the vast Stourhead estate in Wiltshire, once private, now managed by the British National Trust.

When is a garden a park or a park a garden?  Exploring the hills, lakes, and vistas of  Stourhead made us wonder.  For a while, we strolled through groves of trees, some native to Britain, many imported from distant lands, even tall rough-barked sequoias from California.  Then we stepped out onto a green hillside, a blue lake in the distance, bordered by lawns and clusters of smaller trees and garden plantings.  Across the lake, we glimpsed a Greek temple, its aged columns weathered to a rough patina.  This place was called a garden, but it seemed more of a park, with its paths, meadows, forested hills, lakes and streams, temples and grottos, spectacular and beautiful, but not anything we could imagine creating ourselves.

However, someone did create it: Harry Hoare, whose father inherited the estate when Harry was six years old near the end of the nineteenth century.  Together, over the years, father and son restored the once neglected property into a perfect example of a certain type of English landscape garden.   For a fee, anyone now can enjoy the beauty of this one-time haven for the privileged class, even tromp through the great neoclassic manor house.  

The gardens, though, are Stourhead’s claim to fame and we had a beautiful day to explore them.  Even with clusters of visitors wandering here and there, a feeling of peace and calm lingered.  Strolling through an English landscape garden like this, wherever your gaze rests you should find a pleasant, understated scene, graceful and in good taste.  Stourhead pretty much did the job.

This was a place that invited us to roam without worrying where we might end up.  Around a bend, we found scarlet and white rhododendrons in bloom, but a few steps farther on we discovered a lichen-covered stone grotto and beyond that a mini-Temple of Apollo.  From a densely shaded bend in the path, we descended suddenly into a sunny open space, looking across a finger of the lake toward a weathered water wheel.  It all might be too calculatedly picturesque for everyone’s taste, but we enjoyed discovering the secrets of Harry’s garden, or park. 



 If you enjoy gardens, you'll also
enjoy Simone Martel's collection of
garden-themed stories, EXILE'S GARDEN.
Edwin E. Smith Publishing


Click here for more information
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Sissinghurst's One-of-a-Kind Beauty

6/5/2015

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The day we returned to Sissinghurst in southern England, clouds were bumbling overhead across a blue sky.  We’d visited the castle remains and gardens before, but were impressed again by their unique beauty.  Years had passed since our most recent visit, so we wanted to make the most of our time there, although we half-expected a downpour at any moment. 

            Walking through the arched brick gate into the first garden “room,” we stopped to catch our breath.  It felt familiar, but also different.  Years of dedicated care had given the garden a new polish.  The garden had seemed much more of a work in progress when we were there before.  Of course, we reminded ourselves, all gardens are always a work in progress.  As I’ve often been told, it’s foolish to expect a garden to be perfect, frozen in time.  Plants and flowers come and go like the seasons.  Tastes in plants and flowers change.  Nothing alive can be static.

Novelist, poet, gardener, tempestuous personality: Vita Sackville-West, with her diplomat husband, Harold Nicolson, created a unique world within a world when they transformed the ruins of a once-fortified manor house into their very personal garden and retreat.  Maybe when we were here before, the gardens were less well maintained or maybe our memories were faulty, but the overall layout seemed much the same, with the famous “white garden” and the other “rooms” with their walls, hedges, and borders still spread out on all sides.

            Climbing to the top of the sixteenth century tower, I could look out at much of the estate and see how precisely those rooms were laid out.  Below, in the study in which Vita once did her writing and in the big library in what once was the farm stables, we still could get a sense of the two unique people who created this world for themselves.  A large portrait of the formidable woman that was Vita Sackville-West still presides over the library.  It’s hard to believe that she was only a girl of eighteen when those confident features were painted.

            As we returned to the gardens, that downpour hit us with cold  drops that turned into a splattering of hail before stopping as suddenly as it began.  The dark gray clouds blew away, leaving blue sky blotched with mottled gray and white clouds.  Only lightly dampened, we  wandered on through the gardens, admiring tulips, bluebells, wisteria, and other spring blossoms, even some early roses.  Our garden doesn’t have a moat to cope with, as Vita famously wrote in one of her gardening books, but we did pick up a few ideas from the various gardens and their planting arrangements and color combinations.  Maybe the most important gardening lesson we got from this trip is to be fearless: if something doesn’t work out, you can change it.   After all, gardens are a work in progress. 

If you enjoy gardens, you'll also enjoy
Simone Martel's collection of garden-themed
stories, EXILE'S GARDEN, Edwin E. Smith Publishing.



Click Here for More Information
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Spring Breaks Out in London

6/3/2015

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            Walking one morning along the crowded street that leads away from busy Paddington Station, I stopped to watch two men carry long boxes of blooming flowers from a white van and set them on tables in front of a pub.  Box after box of brightly colored petunias, marigolds, blue marguerites, and gaudy primroses soon covered the tables.  Then the men climbed onto ladders, hoisting the narrow boxes into position above the doors and windows on two sides of the corner pub until the display announced for all to see that spring had arrived in London.  After that, I noticed other boxes and baskets of flowers in front of other pubs, cafes, shops, and even department stores throughout the city. 

            Strolling through residential neighborhoods, from time to time I came to park-like fenced gardens in squares surrounded on four sides by identical townhouses.  Only the residents of those homes had keys to open the gates to the gardens, but looking through fences, past trees and shrubs, I could see spring blossoms ranging from tulips and iris in the ground to climbing clematis and roses to waterfalls of purple wisteria, lilac, and white jasmine.  Some of the white-painted houses displayed their own window boxes of spring flowers.  Beyond the quiet squares, the sounds of city traffic rumbled, almost like mountain streams.

            The people of London take spring seriously.  The big event each spring is the Royal Horticultural Society’s Chelsea Flower Show, where for five days gardeners from across Britain display their best blossoms and most brilliant garden designs.  Each year, the show sells out, forcing those who didn’t plan ahead to buy tickets from scalpers.  Displays in shop windows around the city celebrate the annual event.  This year, the Queen’s Gallery in Buckingham Palace celebrated spring and the show with its own exhibition, “Painting Paradise: the Art of the Garden,” presenting room after room of paintings, illustrated manuscripts, drawings, and artifacts depicting gardens through history, from the Garden of Eden to an Indian Mughal garden and Chinese plantings, to Dutch tulips and the formal gardens of Versailles and Hampton Court. 

            One day, we walked through the sprawling garden at Kensington Palace, admiring the wide lawns bordered by beds of tulips and pansies, wandered through the famous sunken garden, and rested by the Orangery, where Queen Anne’s orange trees once were protected from winter frost, but now is a restaurant.  Another day, we strolled along some of the narrow streets of Hampstead, admiring the small but elegant front gardens of the old brick houses.  The fresh green color of the trees showed that they had only recently come into leaf.  Tulips, wisteria, clematis, and lilac brought the hillside neighborhood alive with color and perfume.  Even the earth of this hectic city opened itself to springtime.

           


If you enjoy gardens, you'll enjoy reading
Simone Martel's collection of garden-themed stories,
EXILE'S GARDEN.

Click Here for more information
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Spring in England

6/2/2015

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        England is not suffering from a drought, at least not this year.  Coming from sun-burned California, the lush growth everywhere was quite a shock.  As we traveled across the countryside, between villages and towns, on our way to the famous and not-so-famous gardens on our itinerary, we were dazzled by rolling green hills, fields of golden rapeseed, and multi-colored bursts of wild flowers in bloom.   Often clouds rolled across the blue sky above, occasionally gathering into gray clusters that threatened rain.  Usually, the showers held off, but all of this luxuriant growth around us had been well-watered recently.  Nobody here had to carry buckets of bathwater to their gardens.

In every town and village, we discovered walls of purple – and occasionally white – wisteria, sometimes completely covering the side of a building, even climbing onto the roof.   Seldom had we ever seen such extravagant wisteria.  By comparison, our wisteria at home seemed puny and sickly.  Walking on the streets of the Cotswold villages of Broadway and Stow on the Wold, we got the impression that before long the wisteria would devour all of those ancient houses and shops of gold limestone.  Some of the trunks of these aged wisterias were thicker than my arm, twisting and bending like sinewy muscles as they crawled up the walls and over the tops of windows and eaves.

A yellow climbing rose almost as aggressive covered whatever the wisteria didn’t.  I recognized the Lady Banks blossoms because one was trying to cover the back of our garage in Berkeley, but most of these outdid even that one.   Rhododendrons and azaleas were in full bloom, too, some of the bushes as large as big trees, their gaudy reds and pinks and salmon colors almost attacking the gray sky. 

Even the smallest patch of ground in these villages displayed blossoming shrubs and spring flowers, tulips, iris, and blossoms I didn’t yet recognize.  It was too early for most of the roses to be in bloom, but the other flowers were compensating.  During the weeks we spent visiting gardens in southern England, I learned just how serious the British can be about gardening.  I also learned about herbaceous borders, those lavish mixtures of plants and flowers that line so many of the gardens there.  

Everyone, it seems, has a theory or two about gardening and will debate it happily if you give them a chance.  They also will share their experience and knowledge, offer advice and encouragement, and wish you well with your own gardening efforts.  Gardeners, after all, are nice people and believe in nurturing the earth. 



If you enjoy gardens, you'll also enjoy reading
Simone Martel's collection of garden-themed stories,
EXILE'S GARDEN, Edwin E. Smith Publishing.



Click here for more information
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    Author


          I've been writing at least since age seven, making up stories before that, and exploring the world almost as long as I can remember.  This blog is mostly about writing and traveling -- for me the perfect life. 
          Please Bookmark my blog, so you won't miss any posts.
          My most recent book is DELPHINE, winner of the Clay Reynolds Novella Prize.        Recently, my first novel, THE NIGHT ACTION, has been republished by Automat Press as an e-book, available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other sources.  CLICK here to buy THE NIGHT ACTION e-book.

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