Picking up from my first post, here is part two of touring Bunny Williams’ Garden. We are leaving the Parterre Garden and Conservatory and moving towards the main house and gardens along the back of the house. I am presenting the photos in the order we toured the gardens, compared to what might be an expected order.
The Potting Shed. We entered the main house’s garden behind the potting shed which was once the former carriage house. This end room allows Bunny to arrange flowers from the garden to fill the house. If you look back in the photo above you can see the link between the parterre garden and entering the back of the main house.
Please ignore how blurry this photo is, but I still wanted to share since we loved the idea of the cut flower bucket holder. During the week, the gardeners cuts from the garden items in bloom to fill the buckets. When Bunny arrives to the house, she can pull from these buckets to create flower arrangements for around the house. You can see the buckets include a mix of flowers and foliage plants. This is a great inspiration for Allison for how to transport cuttings for the garden into the house for arranging into our flower room (also know as the laundry room.)
BACK GARDEN. Here you are looking back from the garden towards the house and can see the “L shape” of the house. The next few gardens posted are what this view of the house looks towards.
Here is a wave clipped yew hedge that surrounds a manicured lawn. Walking the property you don’t really notice much manicured lawn. Here the hedge provides a formal boundary to the property with the woods beyond.
SUNKEN GARDEN. To the far left of the house is the sunken garden. If you scroll a few images down you can see how the garden is positioned from the main house. In the image above through the arch was an area going through some turf restoration, but was more natural planted. I did not have any photos of this area.
Within the sunken garden you can see more over the top boarders created with a mix of perennials and annuals. This is a designed space, but also another location to cut flowers for use inside the house.
THE FRONT GARDEN. Finally we have made it around the the front of the house with the series of globe prunned boxwoods. I love that these are purnned as individual globes compared to created into one master hedge.
THE CUTTING & VEGETABLE GARDEN. We have made it to the final stop of our tour at the vegetable and cutting garden, and September is a wonderful time to see final blooms of summer and produce laden plants. In her book, Bunny mentioned the parterre garden used to contain her vegetable garden, but when the barn became more of an entertaining space, she moved the productive garden to a new location with a greenhouse.
The chicken coop is amazing and reminds me of P. Allen Smith’s Poultryville’s palladian palace with the coops being significant architectural buildings compared to something more scaled to the chickens. James’ highlight of the tour was catching a grasshopper in the garden and feeding it to the chickens.
We have reached the end of the tour, which is going to be the perfect segue into the next post I have been working on with sources for getting started on growing your own vegetable garden. I hope you enjoyed the two posts with the garden tour and it was a good distraction from your home. I had a great time going back through all the photos myself and remembering all the ideas I wanted to take away from the gardens and her studio.
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Stay Safe and remember your garden, no matter what it looks like or size, provides a great retreat while staying at home.