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| En route South, "is Shakespeare coming out to play?" |
May and June are great months to wander round gardens with Spring definitely springing and Summer peeping out every now and again. A recent re-visit to Ripley Castle (home of the Inglebys, Trooper Jane and Civil War shenanigans) featured a lovely walk around the walled areas, lakes and weirs in the deer park and grounds. Blooms, bushes, trees and views across the lake – great soup for the soul.
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| Ripley Castle |
The picture at the top of this post is of one of my favourite spots in the world, New Place in Stratford-upon-Avon, Shakespeare’s family house, which I’ve blogged about before. It was a stop-off on a recent venture South – yes, the South, the land below the North. My next blog will show where we went. In the meantime New Place was as tranquil as ever; great to visit early in the morning on a working day and happily just before any school parties or tourist buses arrived. And did those feet in ancient time (Shakespeare’s, that is) tread the ground of New Place and did those hands write some his works there? I have no doubt.
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| The centre of Shakesperare's world for the final stretch of his life |
A society grows great when old people plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in. As I hit the home stretch of my first novel, Sally is spending as much time as the weather allows in the garden, tending, feeding, pruning, designing. Waiting for things to grow is a wonderful pass-time for humanity, seeing the incremental budding and bursting. If we all spent more time gardening, the world would doubtless blossom.
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| Kenilworth Castle |
An eyewitness account by Robert Laneham has allowed English Heritage to recreate an Elizabethan privy garden at Kenilworth Castle. The whole site is well-managed with excellent audio-guides (in my opinion) and it was easy to picture Elizabeth I stopping there with Robert Dudley on her tour and lingering longer than planned. Robert Laneham writes that he sneaked into the garden one day when the queen was “out hunting” and noted the fountain could “at the twist of a stopcock” shoot spouts of water over anyone in the grounds who was “found hot in desire.” (Having been in the Civil War at Ripley, Jacobean times at New Place and Elizabethan times at Kenilworth, we then went further back in time for our next stop….)
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| Kenilworth Castle |
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