I’ve just spent a long weekend in high winds and pouring rain , exploring some of the gardens around Bournemouth. Not ideal conditions, even in February, but the unusual advantage was that we were usually the only people on site! The one garden where the wind and the rain didn’t matter that much was Compton Acres at Canford, between Poole and Bournemouth.
Although originally built as a private garden in the early 1920s it was soon opened to the public for charity. After the first owner died it slowly became what Tim Mowl in his book Historic Gardens of Dorset, called “a visitor centre with gardens attached’. Now one of Britain’s most visited gardens it’s definitely none the worse for that.
A very brief history of the site and lots of photos of the garden today can easily be found on-line as well as in the guidebook, but as I tried to research a bit further I discovered that these sources gloss over the story of the garden’s early days… 
Browsing second-hand books a few months back I chanced up a shelf that had a stack of similar looking volumes which all came from a series called “Handbooks of Practical Gardening”. They covered almost every aspect of horticulture you can imagine from Asparagus Growing and Bee-Keeping to Daffodils and Fruit Bottling via Garden Pests, Window Gardening and Rarer Vegetables.
The Garden History Blog 
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