Cotehele Garden
The garden of Cotehele House is really two. Behind the house, on the west, is a relatively formal compartmented garden within the old walled garden, recently restored. Here is a pool, herbaceous borders, orchard and annuals for cutting. Linking this to the valley garden on the east side is a sloping meadow, ablaze with hundreds of varieties of daffodils in spring and dotted with crocuses, anemones and fritillaries. The Tamar Valley was once prime daffodil growing territory, the early crop exported to London by water from Cotehele Quay. A grove of acers finally links meadow and terrace. Below the formal eastern rose terrace lies the ten-acre valley garden, a delight when its magnolias, camellias, rhododendrons and azaleas are in flower. Later come impressive hydrangeas and superb dogwoods. At any time you can enjoy the view of an ancient dovecote across a lily pond, the palms, ferns, tree ferns, bamboos and gunnera. Views continue eastwards to take in the Calstock railroad viaduct over the River Tamar. A stream runs down the valley, through a series of small pools bordered by king cups, irises and candelabra primulas. Leaving the garden at the bottom end, a path leads left along the Tamar to Calstock, right heads down to Cotehele Quay with its small maritime museum, tearooms and visitor centre.
Dovecot in the valley water garden
Signed by lanes from A390 2 miles W of River Tamar
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Creed House Garden
This must surely be Cornwall's most self-effacing garden. Although open to booked groups and occasionally for charity, you will find little mention of it in the usual sources. And there are none of the usual signs pointing to the garden, not even to the hamlet of Creed. An ill signed turning, about a third of the way up Grampound's main street, is actually Creed Lane. A mile down that you turn left just after the church and turn in the first gate on the left. It is worth doing so, as we found in Aigust 2006. The Croggons came to Creed House, the former Rectory, in 1974. The garden had been neglected for years and it was some while before they discovered extra buildings hidden under brambles and bindweed. Since then they have been steadily planting and improving and are now clearing some additional woodland. There are fine specimen trees - both young and old, several small ponds, a stream garden, a bog garden, shrub and herbaceous borders and a couple of lawns. Behind the stable yard is a walled garden with colourful planting around a lawn. The overall effect is very tranquil. Whilst here do take a look at the light and airy church, nestling below the garden, where my father's cousin Bertie was rector for several years before becoming rector at St. Just in Roseland. We visited Creed again in June 2016, found the garden colourful and well tended and enjoyed tea and cakes on the terrace.
Enys Garden near Penryn
In the same family since Norman times, and reputedly the first Cornish garden to receive public attention, Enys seems to be spoken of with something like awe. Garden writer Timothy Mowle refers to it as 'a sleeping beauty of a garden'. Douglas Ellory Pett, Cornish garden expert, has a brief description in his Cornwall Gardens Guide. So, learning that a Trust had been formed to restore Enys and had applied for Heritage Lottery funding for that purpose, and that it was open a couple of days a week from March to October (and on the first Sunday of each month), we thought that, despite references to 'the first stages of romantic decay', it could be worth visiting. We did so on the first Sunday of May 2006. So did about a thousand others. We are sorry to say that we were very disappointed. We should have guessed, when we passed the gloomy-looking four-square Regency house, looking for all the world like a run-down Anglo-Irish home, that little had been done to the garden except the clearance of a few paths. We would have been right. Nowhere looked as if any effort had yet been made and few rhodos, azaleas or magnolias were in bloom. The guide leaflet was misleading and most people were losing their way in woodland that should have been marked off-limits. The lakes that Pett refers to were not accessible. Frankly, nothing was worth seeing except the wonderful blankets of bluebells in Parc Lye.
Glendurgan and Trebah revisited 2014
Living, as we do, 40 miles or so from Mawnan Smith, it is not often that we get to see the Helford River ravine gardens. However, a free pass to Trebah encouraged us that way and National Trust membership added Glendurgan. We had expected to prefer Glendurgan to Trebah and were surprised that it didn’t work that way. In the event we found Glendurgan a little colourless and short on views while Trebah seemed full of colour with many delightful views. Glendurgan’s prime feature must be its impressive and well-kept maze, best seen from the high path on the east side of the ravine. Trebah’s is the view north up the ravine from the beach end of the garden, looking across a small lake and past massed hydrangeas in the valley and mature trees on the slopes up to the house. In both gardens we set out on the high western path and returned first on the high eastern path and then on the low central path. In Glendurgan this allows you to see the Schoolroom Summerhouse, in Trebah you get to see the impressive new stone amphitheatre, built in 2014 and already the venue of the Miracle Theatre’s production of ‘The Tempest’. We concluded that the essential difference between the two gardens is that Glendurgan is presented ‘take it ot leave it’ while Trebah is very much a commercial enterprise with shop, plant centre and a good large restaurant/caf�. As members we would like to prefer Glendurgan but have to plump for Trebah.