Six delightful courtyard gardens at Tintinhull Garden

On longer journeys we've taken to stopping at a National Trust property instead of the more usual service station.  It means we plan ahead and have a couple of properties up our sleeve - in case of traffic or the need to take a different route at short notice, but it's definitely worth it. 

On our way to Devon recently we stopped at Tintinhull Garden, near Yeovil in Somerset.  And if you were in any doubt as to why we choose not to stop in a service station wherever possible, this was our first view of the property.

A courtyard café or a service station - you decide!

We decided on our usual format - a tour around the garden ending in the café.

There's six different gardens here at Tintinhull and while there's two rooms open in the house (the rest is a holiday cottage) because it was such a nice day and because we'd been cooped up in a Renault Clio for a good few hours we skipped the house and headed through the gate into the Cedar Court garden.

This was the first space that Captain and Mrs Phyllis Reiss developed.  It had been a rough muddy paddock and the transformation was amazing.  They bought Tintinhull in 1933 and created a well thought out and harmonious small garden.  When I say small I mean about 1.5 acres

We moved into the Eagle Court garden which leads out from the drawing room it's quite formal and definitely leads your eye (and you) through to Phyllis's garden and the Middle garden.

Just look at the size of these hydrangeas - they're like cauliflowers!  But prettier.  And not so cauliflower-y!

Having finally got me to step away from the hydrangeas we moved towards the Fountain Garden.

Even the prettiest gardens have problems - that's always reassuring

And then onto the Kitchen Garden - which during Mrs Reiss' lifetime no visitors were allowed into as she believed that vegetables were for eating not looking at.  Well she definitely won't approve of my lettuce envy then...

To the side of the Kitchen Garden there were some glorious poppies, crocosmias and goats in the adjoining orchard.

After comparing veg and drooling over the lettuces we moved on to the Pool Garden, which surprisingly used to be a tennis court and is dedicated to the memory of their nephew who was a fighter pilot in the second world war.

And the borders here were full of colour.  It was definitely a place to sit and while away some time.  We sat for a while, but there was a scone in the café with our name on so it wasn't for too long.  We also needed to scoop ourselves back into the Clio to continue our journey. 

Actually that's the downside of stopping at places like this en-route, it's tough to tear yourself away again.  No one said that ever about a service station, I'm sure.

I am rather partial to a Red Hot Poker.  And with that we took this Allium seed-headed path back to the courtyard café (and that scone)

But before we continued the rest of our journey I couldn't help but stop and admire this lemony dahlia.

And to have a peek in here.  Do you know what it is?

Of course, it's the letter box!  Seriously.

A new sign for our garden...

When we were in Guernsey last summer celebrating our wedding anniversary I fell for this vintage pool sign.  You know the sort of falling that meant every walk we did around St Peters Port involved just happening to wander past the shop with the sign in the window...

Just by chance, of course...

After a couple of times going into the shop eventually we came out with our very own sign!  It wasn't expensive but we'd travelled for the weekend with hand baggage only and I'd needed to convince MOH it would fit into our rucksacks.  It did but for the record I would have been willing to ditch some clothes for it, clearly his not mine...

But anyway, last week I hung it in the garden on our Laburnum tree.  Although MOH had bought some chain to hang it with in the end I used some red ribbon - mainly because I couldn't work out how to attach the chain and because I wanted it around one of the branches, so it hung correctly. It'll need to come down for the winter so there'll be another opportunity to work out how to attach the chain next spring!

Here it is zoomed out a bit.

And no, we don't have a pool!  But if we ever got one, I've already got the sign...  Just as I finished hanging the sign the weather had a go at providing a natural pool with a mahoosive storm, so my lovely new sign has already survived it's first downpour.

Hanging my latest garden ornament got me to thinking about what else we have in our garden, so I thought I'd share some of those too.  Here's a wooden whirly thing (technical term) which I bought in Cairns, Australia back in the late 90s - it's mesmerising to sit and watch it whirl!

Then there's the cast iron owl who's been hung from one of our large sycamore trees near the patio.  He holds a tea light and while he looks quite grumpy about it he casts a nice glow when he's lit.

This is our rainbow glass hanging which we bought in Padstow, Cornwall in a shop that wasn't owned by Rick Stein!   He's everywhere in Padstow and we stayed in his B&B - very nice it was too, but it did become a bit of a challenge for us to bring something non-Rick back with us!

Ah the obelisk.  This is at the end of our garden and provides a focal point from the house.  I had the winning bid in a charity auction at work, much to MOH's dismay.  It's about 5 foot tall and made of wood and not something MOH was prepared to carry home on the train, so we drove up to the City to collect it one weekend.  It was that colour when I bought it and it stays out in all weather and has lasted remarkably well!

These are our concrete hares - Hartley and Devon, of course we named them.  We saw these at an exhibition at Greenacres in Devon, which was Agatha Christie's house and is now a National Trust property.

Being us, we didn't buy them at the time and then regretted it.  So onto the internet I went to find out who made them and to order a couple.  I managed that ok and then arranged for them to be delivered to MOH's aunt's house in Devon, where my in-laws collected them when they visited and we collected them from them!

Actually even if we'd bought them when we were there, we'd travelled to Devon by train so lugging two concrete hares back into and across London probably wouldn't have happened.  And if you're wondering about the names - of course you'd call your hare Hartley wouldn't you?!  Well you would if you grew up in the 1970s and watched Pipkins.

Our wind chimes came all the way from Maui, Hawaii which we visited for a wedding and we had no trouble getting this one in our case, although it did have a stop over in Las Vegas on the way back.

The last of my ornaments that I'm sharing needs a bit of work.  It's a dove house, but unfortunately the bottom fell out and it needs a bit of a paint-job and some work done to the roof.

But I think it should be fixable - with some woodwork skills from MOH - and I have some plans for it, which I'll share when they come off!

So that's my garden ornaments - what do you have in your garden?

Exploring the house at Ickworth

You'll already know that we spent a good few hours wandering around grounds at Ickworth - see the parks and gardens at Ickworth House - and that I've teased you with a couple of black and white pictures of the staircase and landing already - see Black & White photos #6: A sneak peek into Ickworth House - well here's the last of my posts from our visit to Ickworth House.

It really is a lovely place to visit.

The rotunda - which took 37 years to complete - is the eye catcher of the house and rightly so, it was designed to impress and to hold the Earl-Bishop's art collection "in a way which would be instructive to his visitors" but there is so much more to see.

The tour of the house starts downstairs and alongside the stairs that down you below stairs are some fantastic quotes from both family members and servants alike. 

My favourites were from Mary MacRae, Lord and Lady Bristol's granddaughter who said "... the men all shot and they had a lovely time, grumbling if they didn't get as many birds as they expected to" and "Lunch was generally, in the big shoots, taken out to one of the keeper's cottages, silver an' all"

Both of these quotes immediately set the scene of a very busy house both upstairs and below.  We've all seen Downton Abbey and other period dramas so know that the real busy-ness happens below stairs, not that those above stairs would ever really admit to it!

Downstairs at Ickworth is set out to give you an understanding of how the house works, and it's really effective.  This is the finishing kitchen which is under the main rotunda and was converted as part of a modernisation project in the early 20th-century.

It was only used when the family were entertaining on a grand scale and using the dining room in the Rotunda rather than their family dining room in the east wing.  Food was prepared in the main kitchen and then brought here for finishing before being served; it sounds odd to us but this ensured the food was served hot - something that was quite unusual and that the family were proud of as often at large gatherings this often didn't happen!

The basement is set up as it would be in the mid-1930s and you are encouraged to explore it, opening drawers or using the 1930s typewriter to bash out a note.

As you wander around the basement you hear clips which bring each room to life, these are the result of many hours of interviews with surviving servants, family members and friends who used to live and work at Ickworth during the 1900s and they're fascinating.  The volunteers too below stairs (and upstairs) are there to share more about the rooms and the people that used them on a daily basis.

Back upstairs we headed towards the Pompeian room with its rare neo-classical frescoes.  The room was completed in 1879 and has recently been the object of preservation following water damage from the corridor roof, but the colours are amazing and we spent some time in here just simply in awe.

The other thing we noticed is the curved corridors.  The floorboards also curve and match the curvature of the walls, how much detail?

As well as noticing floors, I often notice and am quite taken with ceilings (remember the one from my earlier post of the church on the estate) so here's another painted ceiling I saw as we wandered through the house.

Upstairs we found ourselves in the Lady of the house's bathroom.  And it was quite literally that - a room with a bath - there was no toilet as we'd expect today, there were still servants for that sort of thing! 

But just look at the tiles, aren't they gorgeous?

In her bedroom there was a lovely coloured chandelier - sorry the picture is not so good - but the colours, they really were good.

And then all too quickly, we'd completed the tour.  We returned to the landing with the impressive roof, which we learned was originally meant to be left open but was enclosed for practical heating reasons and that up until relatively recently the Marquess of Bristol would insist on giving local children personal tours to the top of the rotunda!

So if you're ever in Suffolk, don't forget to pop into Ickworth.