The Potager at Scampston Hall

It’s been a while since our weekend in Malton and I’ve been meaning to share more from our visit to the Walled Gardens and Parkland at Scampston Hall. I took many photos (no surprise there) and so I’ll be sharing a series of posts from our visit finally - it’s a great place to visit with a fab cafe too, so if you’re close by and considering a visit, then definitely go.

The Walled Garden was designed by Piet Oudolf in 1999, and while Oudolf is often now imitated this garden remains his largest private commission in the UK. There are twelve sections to the walled garden, and you know how much I love a potager, or a vegetable garden, so that’s where we’re starting.

Along with the cut flower garden, the vegetable garden supplies the house and cafe with a range of fresh flowers and vegetables. As with any productive garden the planting schemes change regularly, but isn’t that what we love about gardens?

Any gate inviting you to come in in a garden is a welcome sight, and this one especially so with it’s modern block design by local craftsman Peter Coates. I seem to have cut my photo off though, so it’s not easy to see that it contains the word Yat, which is the Yorkshire dialect for gate. A gate with meaning, as well as good looks - yes, I’m definitely coming in!

Wow. I so love a productive garden, and when we visited in September many veg plots are at their peak, so it’s a great time to visit.

Just look at that Ruby Chard, I’d forgotten how beautiful and structural they can be - I definitely want these in my garden, even though they’re one of the veg that MOH has been known to turn his nose up at, though thinking again that could be due to the sheer volume of chard we grew when we had our allotment!

I found two of my favourite pumpkins here too, this Turks Turban and the bluer skinned Crown Prince. The third that I’d add to my favourite pumpkin list is the Red Kuri or Onion Squash which I have managed to grow in my previous garden. I’m not sure if I’ll find a space for pumpkins here - they ramble a lot - but if I can I will.

There’s nothing better than fresh sweetcorn on the cob is there, and none can be fresher than these - I can’t wait for the local sweetcorn this year, though there’s a good few months before I’ll see these in the farm shops, let’s hope there’s plenty of sun this summer to make them extra sweet.

I was pleased to see the red chicory growing in a Yorkshire garden - we’re a bit further south, so by rights that means we should be able to grow them too. I love their colour and structure, and I also love them in a blue cheese risotto which MOH makes - it’s the best flavoured risotto, most I can give or take but this one I’ll always have, thank you very much. Many years back I remember we scoured our part of South London for a red chicory without a huge amount of success, but times have changed and I see them much more often now, but to grow my own - and have that risotto almost on tap - now that would be the dream.

I’m also a sucker for photographing cabbages with their characterful, and clearly very tasty, nibbled leaves. I’ve long given up on my long held dream of growing many varieties of cabbages in perfectly straight rows (as once seen at the Lost Gardens of Heligan in Cornwall), and would settle for a couple of slightly less nibbled ones that could end up in the kitchen at some point!

The Walled Garden has so much more to see, and not everything that you’d expect to see so look out for further posts in the coming weeks to see what else this fantastic space has to offer.

Poppy heads and tentative sweet peas

We’re staying in Yorkshire for today’s post, and it’s the first Flowers on Friday for a week or two. When I was sorting through photos of Castle Howard for yesterday’s Brideshead Revisited post, the poppies and their seedheads stood out. I”m not sure if it’s the insect on one, how they’re all standing to attention or the contrast with the dark background, which is actually a yew hedge. Or the delicate pinkness of the flowers. Or the sun, which has been mostly missing this week hasn’t it?

It’s not been cold though. Just wet. Very wet.

Maybe it’s the sun as this sweet pea making its way up the obelisk also appealed. Sigh.

Just a short post today, but one full of sunshine. A girl can dream hey?

Or, we could all combine our sun dancing skills, it seems we’ve perfected our rain dancing ones!

Brideshead visited and restored

Yes I know it should be revisited, but as it’s my first visit I can hardly revisit can I? Though I will admit when we booked our trip to Yorkshire last year Castle Howard was high on my ‘to visit’ list, which may just have been swayed by the TV series which aired in the early 80s. MOH though, was of course, completely unaware of this.

In fact the walled garden was fantastic and by far exceeded my expectations of a walled garden, I’d like to a post, but it seems I’ve not shared them yet. Clearly I’ve been keeping them for myself (and the other hundreds of thousands of people who visit each year!)

But once we were in the house, I was on Brideshead watch. So I was pleased with the Brideshead Restored exhibition.

The rooms from this exhibition were completely destroyed by fire in 1940, five years before Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited novel. While the original series was filmed at Castle Howard, it also hosted the cinema version released in 2008. The burnt out shells of the rooms still remained when Miramax were looking for locations, and the producers quickly realised there was an opportunity to turn these rooms into film sets.

In 2007 the area was cleared for carpenters, set builders and painters to transform it into a dramatic painted interior. The murals have been “convincingly distressed” to look as if they have been part of the fictional Brideshead Castle for many years.

This room was used for two scenes in the film - dinner on the first evening when Charles Ryder stays with the Marchmain family, and Lord Marchmain’s deathbed scene if you must know. I don’t think I’m breaking any secrets by saying in both cases some licence was taken by the film makers.

The view from the windows also featured strongly in the film, and when it’s this good, why wouldn’t it?

And I couldn’t end this post without a glimpse at the Brideshead cast reunion. Sigh.

I’ve a feeling I’ll be dipping into the book for a top up of some teenage memories. Let’s just call it the Downton effect…