Growing Fond of English Gardens

Modern "earth art" mixes with old plantings at the Lost Gardens of Heligan in Cornwall. (Photos By Craig Webb)

For most visitors, England's Canterbury Cathedral is a place to stop, marvel and meditate. For me and my wife, it was the place to turn right, drive out of town and search for a nursery.

Bypassing a three-star Michelin site in favor of a place renowned for clematis might seem like folly, but that's been the norm for us during the three vacations we have taken in England these past four years. We organize our own garden tours, seeking out the smaller, personal places that often represent gardening's greatest achievements in a country that takes flowers very, very seriously.

My wife loves such trips because she's a gardening fanatic. I, on the other hand, lack the nose for scent, the eye for shape and the feel for dirt that distinguish even the budding plantsman. I'm lousy with colors and dangerous with a shovel. Nevertheless, I have found so much to enjoy from these trips that I would recommend you tour English gardens even if you think allium belongs in the periodic table.

The first non-gardening pleasure lies in getting to them. Most of the country's great small gardens are located in what at best qualify as hamlets, so finding them usually requires a cross-country treasure hunt. I spent much of the most recent trip relying on a table-size map scaled at just three miles to the inch, and to find one place I had to work off an even more detailed hiker's map -- and ask for directions. In such conditions, arriving becomes a reward in itself.

Second, on a garden tour you can enjoy nature without having to transform into Grizzly Adams. I enjoy being in a place that's driven by the seasonal calendar, not the political one, but I don't want to have to strap 50 pounds of provisions onto my back to do so. At gardens, you can dip your toe into nature, knowing there's always a WC, a tea room and a pub close by.

In addition, on an English garden tour you don't just encounter flowers: You also get to know -- and often meet -- the people who built the place or at least folks who learned directly from the creator. Unlike most art and architecture, great gardens are created from materials that, as Emily Dickinson put it, can be "covert in April, candid in May." This preternatural talent for crafting memorable spaces that look consistently great but are never the same from one day to the next is something that can awe even a non-gardener.

Finally, a gardening tour reveals a side of the English that you can't get from monuments. England is a place where plant shows air on prime-time TV and where the grounds of the Chelsea Garden Show are England's equivalent to the sidelines of a Los Angeles Lakers game. People here celebrate Be Nice to Nettles Week.

Our trips have occupied close to five weeks and covered several thousand miles of southern England. You're unlikely to have as much time in a single trip, so you'd be best off picking one section of the country and sticking to it. Here are some of my favorites, divided according to their location generally west or east of London, plus one in the city itself.

Cornwall and Somerset

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Bumper stickers promoting Cornwall are as plentiful in England as the ones seen in the United States for the Outer Banks, although the residents of Nags Head aren't demanding independence from North Carolina the way some Cornish seek separation from England. Still, Cornwall shares with the Outer Banks a sense of being a place apart. Attitudes about time differ from those in the big city, such as what a Cornishman means when he says he'll get to the task "d'rectly." Said one frustrated London expatriate: " 'D'rectly' is Cornish for 'mañana.' "

It helps to have such an attitude when you're visiting gardens here at England's western tip. Trying to see them all in a single trip is folly; one guide lists more than 100 gardens open most of the year, and a dozen more that can be viewed on special days. In addition, most of Cornwall's roads are so narrow and winding you'll be lucky to top 30 mph half the time. All those twists and turns help create microclimates that, combined with temperatures that in some places never even dip to freezing, permit Cornish gardens to display semitropical plants that would have trouble surviving even next door in Devon.

Despite the travel limitations, it's still possible to see a couple of gardens per day and have time left over for a cream tea. We did that one day near the town of St. Austell. We began at Marsh Villa Gardens, located on a tidal creek that Daphne du Maurier made famous in her novel "House on the Strand." Gardeners, who tend to take a keen interest in dirt, will be impressed with what owner Judith Stephens has accomplished since 1988 by infilling a marshland with "waste soil of no great quality," as one local guide puts it. I was more impressed with the fact that I could meet Stephens, a thin, gray-haired woman with an unassuming manner, and get parking assistance from her husband.

It's a family operation as well at nearby Pine Lodge Gardens, where Shirley Clemo supervises a 30-acre site that has more than 6,000 different plants, husband Ray does odd jobs, Shirley's sister runs the fudge shop on-site and Ray's sister and brother work with plants and bookings. When I couldn't identify one plant, my wife and I approached Shirley and she marched with us back to the mystery. (It was a Jerusalem sage, a Mediterranean native normally not found in Washington.) We then chatted with Shirley about the pinetum that she was creating in a back garden, in which pine trees of all types stand 25 yards apart, like sentries in a field. They seem too far apart now, but Shirley was thinking about how they'd look decades from now, once the trees had matured.