Growing Fond of English Gardens

I couldn't meet Charles Fox, the man responsible for creating Trebah Garden starting in 1831, but I could imagine him as he stood with a telescope and megaphone at his estate house, directing the planting of trees in the ravine below. Like Clemo, Fox also thought ahead; he would have his head gardener build a scaffold as tall as each tree would become, then use that tower as a guide to pick the perfect location. Today those trees are only part of the reason to enjoy this 26-acre site. My wife and I particularly liked strolling beneath the gunnera, whose leaves are bigger than golf umbrellas and whose prehistoric look makes you feel as if there's a T. rex around the corner. (One non-gardening note: Polgwidden Cove at Trebah's base is where 7,500 members of the U.S. 29th Infantry Division sailed from on June 1, 1944, to reach their staging area for the D-Day invasion.)

Gunnera also abound in the "jungle" area at the Lost Gardens of Heligan, where some of the rhododendrons are more than 150 years old and some garden features date from the late 18th century. But Heligan -- "found" as a result of digging and research by Tim Smit and a team in the late 1990s -- also does an exceptional job of restoring a vegetable garden of the late Victorian era, where walls were curved to help focus the sun and pits were excavated and then filled with manure to grow pineapples. (No wonder pineapples were a sign of hospitality: It took so much work to raise them.) It also has a few new touches, such as two pieces of "earth art" shaped like a sleeping woman and a man's head.

Things are much more civilized at Bosvigo, a 1780s-era manor house overlooking the town of Truro and its cathedral. Instead of a jungle you'll find a place where a magnolia has been trained to climb the home's front walls, you pay your admission into a box with the hand-labeled request to "take change if necessary," and you have to ring a hand bell if you want to buy a plant. The gardens surrounding the house resemble a series of rooms with distinct personalities.

At Somerset's East Lambrook Manor Gardens, a framed page from a 1985 edition of Country Life magazine tells of how the manor's owner, Margery Fish, was staying with relatives when the Somerset fire brigade telephoned to say that one of her outbuildings was on fire. "Let the inside of the building burn," she said. "But spray water over all the walls to save the climbing plants."

Such priorities befit the woman most responsible for popularizing the idea of the cottage garden. Her revolutionary ideas started in an atmosphere of oppression: When she first came to the then-derelict manor house in 1938, her husband dictated construction of a garden with straight lines, concrete paths and nothing allowed to run free. Fish had to wait until after her husband's death in 1947 before she could create the painterly, seemingly carefree mix of colors and plants that won her fame. Though Fish died in 1969, East Lambrook retains the sense of being a personal, lovingly tended creation. On our visit, we were captivated by a tiny girl wearing green Wellingtons decorated with frogs. She resolutely sniffed plant after plant, finally declaring she enjoyed the pinks.

Essex, Sussex and Kent

"I can tell by your accent you're not from here," a white-haired woman wearing sturdy outdoor clothes and a management mien said as we bid her good morning at Goodnestone Park Gardens, near Canterbury in Kent. She was standing in an antique barn-like shed that had been glassed in, plastered with local artists' paintings and converted to a tearoom in which none of the teacups matched.

It turned out that the lady in question was one, in fact -- Margaret, Lady FitzWalter, manager of Goodnestone (technically pronounced "GOOD-nes-tone," though it often gets shortened to "Gun-stone" or "Gunston") and possessor of the third-oldest noble title in England. Goodnestone's manor house dates from 1704 and can count Jane Austen among its visitors; Austen's eldest brother, Edward, married into the family. The plants have nowhere near such lineage, but some walls holding up massive vines (one wisteria is at least 50 yards long) date from the 17th century.

The lineage of the manor house at Great Dixter, located nearby in East Sussex, dates from the late Middle Ages, but the garden today is pretty much the brainchild of one man: Christopher Lloyd, who spent his entire life at the place and died there Jan. 27 at the age of 84. Lloyd enjoyed flouting many conventions of a previous generation of garden experts, such as when he ripped out his father's rose garden and replaced it with a quite un-English menagerie of colorful cannas and dahlias, verbena and even a hardy Japanese variety of banana. Like a Jackson Pollock painting, Great Dixter's gardens were so crowded and messy I had a hard time understanding what was going on or why. But somehow it makes sense -- and it's utterly original.

Some of the most beautiful gardens in England today had rotten childhoods. A prime example can be found northeast of London, just outside the ancient Roman town of Colchester, where in 1960 a woman named Beth Chatto began working in the driest part of England on an overgrown wasteland where the soil alternated between gravel and muck.

Today the Beth Chatto Gardens offer up showpieces in several settings. One garden is set in gravel and features drought-tolerant plants. Another, set along a string of five ponds, offers unexpected sights at just about every turn. At one point I practically stumbled over a plank bench set under a bamboo stand, hidden from but within earshot of a babbling water race set between two of the ponds. A third part of the garden delivers a kaleidoscope of colors in a woodland setting.

London

In contrast, one of my favorite gardens in the whole trip makes no pretense about looking good. Since its founding in 1673, the Chelsea Physic Garden along the Thames in central London has been all about collecting and studying plants, and thus its plantings are set in soldierly ranks rather than in any artistic melange.

But what plants! Chelsea Physic helped finance the collection and study of plants from around the world, including trips throughout the American colonies by John Bartram to find such oddities at the time as the magnolia grandiflora and balsam fir. Chelsea gardeners repaid the favor by sending to the Georgia colony a potentially interesting plant called cotton. (They also helped introduce tea to India.) Chelsea is home to Europe's first heated glasshouse and its first man-made rock garden. If you've ever seen a forsythia or spotted in a plant's Latin name the words banksia or fortunei, you're looking at a plant linked in some way to someone from Chelsea Physic.

We reached Chelsea Physic by driving into London from the east, passing along the way both the Tower of London and Westminster. Michelin might call them three-star sites, but we never thought to stop at either place.

Craig Webb is a writer and editor who lives in Washington.