Plantation Garden
Next to the Roman Catholic Cathedral on Norwich’s Earlham Road, for example, you’ll find the
Plantation Garden. This is a beautifully restored Victorian garden with lovingly tended flower beds, set in a small valley overlooked by Italianate terracing. Among its fascinating features are wooded pathways, a Gothic fountain and hundreds of fantastical decorative terracotta and brick details.
The Exotic Garden
The
Exotic Garden on Thorpe Road certainly lives up to its name. It is an extraordinary collection of tropical plants growing quite happily in the East Anglian climate. Bromeliads, gingers, tree ferns and banana plants, all growing outdoors, bring a burst of the unexpected to this corner of Norwich.
The Exotic Garden is open in high summer when the colours and fragrances of the flowers are at their best. Just around the corner from the garden is the Rosary Cemetery, where wild flowers have been allowed to flourish among the ornate headstones.
Fans of more formal planting will also want to visit Waterloo Park (to the north of Norwich city centre). The park boasts what is believed to be the longest herbaceous borders in Britain. In fact, imaginative planting of trees, shrubs and flowers can be seen throughout Norwich, and the city was a 2005 finalist in the Royal Horticultural Society’s Britain in Bloom competition.
Fairhaven Gardens
Nine miles from Norwich, alongside South Walsham Broad, is the
Fairhaven Garden Trust. There are walks here through the ancient woodland and water gardens, crisscrossed by watery inlets from the Broad. A spectacular springtime show of daffodils, skunk cabbages, bluebells and primroses gives way later in the year to rhododendrons and azaleas. The garden also has the UK's finest collection of naturalised candelabra primulas. Native wildlife is another feature, and one of the garden’s oak trees has stood here for 950 years.
Blickling
For a taste of history, the grounds of
Blickling Hall near Aylsham offer gardens that have evolved over almost 400 years. They feature colour around the year and outstanding yew hedges, imaginative topiary, a large parterre and herbaceous beds. There is an orangery and, farther from the house in extensive woodland, an 18th Century mausoleum in the form of a towering pyramid. Among the garden and landscape designers who have contributed to Blickling are Humphrey Repton, William Nesfield, Sir Digby Wyatt and Norah Lindsay.
Also building on a horticultural heritage,
Raveningham Gardens near Beccles demonstrate the fruits of more than 50 years’ dedicated gardening and restoration. The 18th Century walled kitchen garden and Edwardian rose garden, for example, compliment a vast array of specially selected plants.
Another local highlight is the six acre Dell Garden at
Bressingham Gardens near Diss. This famous garden was created by the late Alan Bloom between 1955 and 1962 and displays some 5000 varieties of herbaceous perennials set in 47 “Island Beds” among parkland and lawns. Alan’s son, Adrian, has created the contrasting “Foggy Bottom” garden also here at Bressingham, making a surprising virtue of a frost pocket!
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