More than a wet weekend in Wales
⬅ previous ⬆introDay 11 ~ May 25 ~ Snitterfield to Home
Time to go home. We still have a bit over a hundred miles via the shortest route, and we think we'd like to do something more interesting than just jump in the car and drive down the M40, so we do a little research and find that the National Trust property at Hidcote Garden is just south of Stratford and not a major detour. “A wild garden in a formal setting” it says, which sounds good to us.
Probably not too hard to guess we're in the Cotswolds with that stone.
The house has some rooms which are open for various purposes, but it's basically not a house that you visit for its interior.
Great minds, eh? There's a picture from this exact same angle on the NT web page, but I think mine is better! Theirs is a bit washed out looking, although from the flowers it has clearly been taken at a very similar time of year.
I think we must have caught it very much at its peak, there's colour everywhere.
The ‘wildness’ seems mainly to be manifested in the absence of formal beds and parterres: there has clearly been a lot of work done here.
Some interesting notes about their continuing plans to develop the garden, and in part return it closer to its original design.
A fascinating note on the relative cost of a lawnmower a little under 70 years ago.
Another information board says that in 2021 they trialled robot lawn mowers and chose a Husqvarna model, though they don't specify which one. However, they say it uses a physical wire boundary to control its mowing area, and even the most expensive model in the range that uses a wire is only £5,500; the starting price for something domestic-sized is well under the £1,000 mark. You can pay a lot more if you want something that will handle a whole golf course or multiple football fields with GPS-based accuracy to 2cm, but I think the takeaway here is that the inflation-adjusted price of lawnmowers has plummeted over my lifetime!
(Patrick and Katie, as mentioned earlier, have a robot lawnmower – in fact they're on their second now – but I don't know what brand or model it is. We are still old-skool and get the grass cut by hand, although admittedly we pay our gardeners Trevor and Neil to do it so I doubt we're saving money. Then again, the cheaper robots don't do stripes, and we like stripes: old-skool, as I say.)
And so we will bid farewell to Hidcote and it's the end of our Welsh Odyssey (gosh, another accidentally trendy reference).
Back on the road and home to the puss-cats.
Next holiday will be my birthday in Crete.
⬅ previous ⬆intro