I’ve just come back from visiting the garden festival at Chaumont-sur-Loire. The great Renaissance chateau there has had a very chequered history, but for the last 28 years has been home to a wonderful celebration of gardens unlike any other that I know.
To start with the festival lasts for months, and combines permanent planting and installations with dozens of temporary ones. It attracts designers and artists from round the world. It values innovation and sustainability more than most, and recycles materials and plants from year to year. It’s also open access, relatively inexpensive and surprisingly uncrowded. Bits of it can be brilliant, others wild and wacky, and sometimes there are miserable failures or a complete mess but thats part of the fun and excitement of going. You never know what you’re going to find!
I was sitting in the garden a while back enjoying the weather and discussing politics with a group of family and friends when the subject of a piece in a well-known newspaper came up and my niece said to my mother: “Sorry, Nan, I don’t EVER want to read an article in the Daily M***, I rather read anything…anything …even a history of hosepipes” So to make sure she always has an alternative here it is!
Even though the job didn’t in the end materialise, Burchell was to remain there for 5 years and wrote up his extensive journeys in Travels in the Interior of Southern Africa, published in 1822-24, a readable and detailed account of his 4,500 miles of exploration and collecting. Apart from giving”a faithful picture of occurrences and observations… even to the minutest particular” on every aspect of life, it is illustrated with his lively sketches and watercolours.
The Garden History Blog 
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