That title is starting to look like the sort of chapter heading you get in a textbook, but the next (seriously awesome) part of England I’m covering is so huge I only got to see about one sixteenth of it, and that one sixteenth will take four postings to cover.
Harewood House. It’s big. And in Australian vernacular, rilly rilly old.
According to Wiki (the font of all useful and dubiously accurate information) it took 14 years to build the joint, starting in 1759, which seems like a pretty speedy build considering the size, the materials used and the technologies available at the time. For the Aussies, this was a few years before this country was invaded. Pretty impressive stuff.
It was the gardens, though, that enticed me to visit (and the classic car show in the grounds sweetened the deal for Crazy Car Man – a perfect day out for our little family), and even though I only got to explore two of them, I came away bloated with knowledge and boggled by new plants I’ve never seen in ‘real life’ before.
Part IIIa is all about The Terrace.
The Terrace was built in 1844 and designed by Sir Charles Barry, who was also responsible for the design of the Houses of Parliament in London. Big woopty doo on politics, I say, let’s look at pretty flowers!
This is the view of Harewood House from the backyard….
How awesomely intimidating would it be inviting your boyfriend/girlfriend back home for the first time…..give me half an hour while I trawl through the backyard to hunt down dad. He’s out there somewhere!
We climbed up the back steps/viewing platform to see what we could see and I do have to admit my admiration for the tricksy bits of hedging making knots and curlicues and ancient languages or something – inspiration for the next generation of tramp stamps.
And look carefully at the body language of the grey mafia admiring Orpheus’s attributes in the next photo.
Just below the back steps, running along the back edge of the back yard, is a border garden of pretty things, such as this:
And this….
Crazy Car Man is by far and away the most gorgeous thing in any garden!
Seriously though, there were so many beautiful flowers in bloom in the border I was slightly dazzled and it took a while for me to remember I had my camera with me.
Peonies give me great joy. They’re blousy and lush and completely over the top, like marabou feathers and shag pile carpet and bellinis. When I grow up I want to grow masses of peonies and tend them wearing a long silk robe and fluffy mules.
Fuschias are another plant that appeal to me, purely and simply for the theatrical nature of their blooms. They’re brassier and sexier than the peony but equally gorgeous.
I had no idea what the following bloom was when I photographed it, but she looked beautiful but seedy, kind of how you feel after kicking it on the dance floor at a night club for six hours. You start off all fresh and gorgeous, and then you drink some wine, shake your groove thing, drink some more wine, do the time warp and then come back to reality at 3am when they flick the house lights on to get rid of everyone. In your head you’re still the beautiful fresh creature you were when you arrived, but in the mirror (or the reflection in the eyes of the guy you were pashing*) you look more or less like this…
I think this is a Papaver Orientale Princess Victoria Louise on the other side of glorious. Very striking nonetheless.
This is such a tiny overview of The Terrace, but it was all the stimulation my little brain could handle without falling out of my ear.
Coming soon is The Himalayan Garden.
* pash = snog (and this was a long long time ago, back when clogs were in fashion for the second time).