White bucks at The White Buck

We’ve had quite a week, and quite honestly, where to start. For the first time in what seems like a long time we had a short break staying in a hotel (rather than self-catering) and one that wasn’t in the Midlands or the north of England. We bucked the trend (sorry!), our own trend that is and headed down to Hampshire with visits to Exbury Gardens and the Gardeners’ World Spring Fair at Beaulieu, and planning to fit in a walk in the New Forest at some point.

There was so much to see, and consequently so many photos to edit before sharing, and then back home a visit to Grand Designs Live over at Excel has just added to it all. So not really knowing where to start, I’m sharing our hotel - The White Buck at Burley - which was just what we needed. It was so nice to get away and have a complete break, and we had a great stay and spotted plenty of bucks in the decor.

But done in a way that wasn’t kitsch. I mean who could resist a stag candlestick?

There were some great furnishings in the bar area too, a good reminder that patterns and plains can give a traditional style a modern twist.

The look and feel continued through to our room too, with the reclaimed wood and neutral palette with pops of colour. Here they came from the bedside tables and the scatter cushions, where the material was also used on the chairs.

The artwork in our room was also stag based, and these two stags looked over us. The brown one (on the left) had a pattern of fir trees on its body, the right (the blue) was just a bit more random, but both worked in the room and actually gave me an idea for a future craft project - another one to add to the list!

I was also taken with the prismatic-type stags head artwork also in our room. So simple, but so effective, understated but impactful.

I’ll share more about our trip, and our visit to Exbury Gardens, the Spring Fair, a brief visit to the National Trust’s Mottisfont and our day at Grand Designs Live and more soon, I just need to get myself a plan as there’s lots to share!

Looking ahead to the Gardeners' World Spring Fair and more

* I have been provided a pair of tickets to the Gardeners’ World Spring Fair, and also for entry to Exbury Gardens & Steam Railway from Gardeners’ World and Exbury Gardens respectively, therefore all posts from these visits will be marked as 'Ad’ though as usual my views and opinions are very much my own.

All of a sudden, it’s next week. I hope those that are exhibiting are a lot more on top of things than I am, otherwise it won’t be much of a show at all…

I’m fully expecting to return with many, many photos and information to share - and I can’t wait. It’ll be good to visit a part of the country we haven’t been to for a while. We used to have a favourite place with self-catering lodges just outside Ringwood that we went to a few times, but things change, and the small independently run spot closed. I think we last visited the New Forest back in 2011, before I even started blogging, but not quite in the physical photo era. I’m sure lots has changed, but I’m also sure lots will have stayed the same.

At the Spring Fair

It’ll be my first time visiting the Gardeners’ World Spring Fair, I’ve been to Gardeners’ World Live in Birmingham a couple of times and it’s always a brilliant day out, so I’m expecting this one to be just as good, and just as inspiring as well as tiring. I’m especially looking forward to:

• The Hillier Secret Garden: inspired by The Secret Garden, a walk-through garden enclosed by high hedges and containing colour-coordinated plants and shrubs portraying the movement of the sun during a spring day. It already sounds magical.

• Paul Stone’s showcase garden Theatre of Greens: the garden will be packed with veg and edible plants, alongside a programme of daily talks hosted by Chris Bavin and feature ‘grow your own’ gurus. I do like a spot of edible growing, though have done very little of this since our house has been on the market, which makes admiring someone else’s work even more enjoyable.

• All of the Beautiful Borders which offer inspiration for small gardens and challenging spaces, the theme is ‘My Garden Escape’, and as I said before this is the part of the shows where MOH despairs of me, I like to see them all and can be quite methodical about making sure I have seen everything. And I mean literally everything.

• Budget-friendly gardens: I’m looking forward to seeing the budget-friendly gardens the horticultural students will create under the expert eye of mentor Cherry Carmen, the award-winning garden designer, a Gold Award at BBC Gardeners’ World Live.

I’m sure we’ll also spend some time time checking out the talks and information available from the Gardeners’ World Live Stage. I know that Frances Tophill is due to be at the show on Friday, so I’ll be looking out for her, and of course the BBC Good Food Market is also taking place, and we’d be foolish to resist that.

Plus two new-to-me gardens to visit

As well as all of that, the Spring Fair is held at Beaulieu so all of their attractions are available too. Hopefully we’ll have the time (and energy) to see the grounds and gardens - at the top of my list is the Victorian Kitchen Garden and Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland Topiary, as I am rather partial to both of these. No doubt, we’ll try to visit as many of the gardens as we can, and make time to see the National Motor Museum. It seems I’m also a closet petrol-head, as we’ve also visited motor museums in Munich (BMW World) and in the Lake District (the Lakeland Motor Museum), both of which are fantastic. For some reason, neither of those visits have made it here, I’m not sure why - maybe I’ll do something about that at some point!

The other new-to-me garden is Exbury Gardens & Steam Railway which celebrates ‘more than 100 years of horticultural excellence’. The gardens were created by Lionel de Rothschild in 1919 and still managed by the family today. It’s famous for its displays of rhododendrons, azaleas and camellias, so hopefully we will be able to see them starting to bloom, as I suspect they may not be quite as advanced this year with the chilly and wet spring we seem to be having.

I also hope to check in on the wisteria in the Sundial Garden but I’m not sure if we’ll get the full wisteria experience, we may be a month too early. And while I’m a closet petrol-head, MOH likes a railway or two - we brought home track, engines and all sorts from his childhood railway adventures, which he assures me will be on eBay at some point. So he's especially interested in the Steam Railway, the Rhododendron Line (let’s hope he doesn’t spend the day calling it the RosieDendron Line, though I’m not holding my breath), with its three engines and ten carriages all named after the Rothschild family. The railway meanders through the garden, and steams through a tunnel modelled on the famous Gothic folly, the Clayton Tunnel is West Sussex, which MOH seemed knowledgeable about when I shared this info, I told you he liked a railway or two!

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

So while there’s plenty on our list already to be keeping us busy, what else would you add? It doesn’t have to be garden related, I think we might be in garden overload if we add more! And I know the New Forest has plenty more to see and visit.

* With thanks in advance to both Gardeners’ World and Exbury Gardens & Steam Railway for providing entry tickets to your event and gardens.

Visiting the Whitechapel Gallery

At the end of last week, after a particularly wet and grey week we decided to break from the norm and make the most of the lighter evening following the clock change. The week hadn’t brought the bright Spring days we were hoping for, and getting out and staying dry was a challenge. However we were not to be fazed, with MOH on the early shift our plan was to head for a museum or gallery - increasing our odds of staying dry - before heading out for dinner.

Some quick online research showed that the Whitechapel Gallery was our best bet. It was open later than most, was relatively easy to get to and neither of us had been there before. It’s set in a beautiful historic building right on Whitechapel High Street with all the hustle and bustle of daily life right on its doorstep, and no doubt an integral part of its community.

We started at the top at one of the free exhibitions - the House of Le Bas (which is on until 31 May) which shares the life and experiences of Delaine Le Bas and her late husband Damian Le Bas and their perspective as English Romani Gypsy Travellers. The room is full of colour with artwork, journals, photographs and embroidery with stories that resist stereotypes and question what it means to be an ‘outsider’.

There was just so much to see, it’s one of those exhibitions that while only in a relatively small space you could visit more than once, and each time see something new or different. I was taken with the amount of work that had clearly gone into each piece, and as you can see from my photos, they’re all incredibly detailed. I appear to be drawn to things with this amount of detail at the moment, and to items that have layers and depth - the whole creation process is fascinating to me, and these pieces were no different.

Thought provoked we made our way back down to the ground floor peeking into the other galleries and spaces, admiring the building as much as the artwork before heading into Zadie Xa’s exhibition titled: House Gods, Animal Guides and Five Ways 2 Forgiveness which closes on 30 April. It’s the largest solo exhibition in London to date for Korean-Canadian artist Zadie Xa and shows a new body of work commissioned by the gallery.

The installation with its sculptures, textiles and paintings along with the immersive lighting and audio are certainly impactful, and once again full of colour and texture. The exhibition’s design, in conjunction with collaborator artist Benito Mayor Vellejo, draws you in and around the space leading you to the large fabric structure inspired by a tranditional Korean home, known as a hanok.

The colours were rich and evocative, transporting you to a different world to the one that was most likely rushing past just a few metres away. And while these were amazing, my favourite piece from our visit was yet to come.

Now isn’t that just amazing?

I believe this piece as Grandmothers (2022) which alongside was the details: hand-sewn and machine-stitched mixed fabrics, bleached and dyed denim, shell buttons and dried flowers. So once again I’ve been drawn to a piece which mixes and matches to great effect and layers textures and materials. I wasn’t surprised that this was the wow piece for me, even though everything I’ve shown in this post was pretty special.

So a late afternoon-early evening well spent, visiting a gallery we’d not been to before and experiencing artists we’d not known about before our visit either. We were also lucky enough not to get rained on and treated ourselves to a steak at the Flat Iron in relatively nearby Spitalfields, which also didn’t disappoint.

All in all a hugely successful impromptu visit, and I’m hoping we’ll have many more of these as the year progresses, wherever we may be!