Great Dixter on the Verge «

Great Dixter on the Verge

Sunday 7th September 2014

I am just a little worried. Angus Willis, world food stylist and now King of Hastings, says, ‘Great Dixter: it’s a bloody mess.’ Always I scream and look as if I might fall. Great Dixter the Golden. I won’t hear a word said against it. This year I’ve not been at all. My last visit was on 1st October 2013, my birthday. Robert Nevil and I were wild with enthusiasm. The Multis have taken to going over from their new Kent desmesne almost every week and have, of course, forged straight to the top, drawing Fergus into their photographic orbit no less.

So last Sunday I went alone to Dixter with a French Count who wants ideas for his estate in Brittany. The pot plants by the front door were as garish as ever but one’s used to that. A giant rudbekia of some kind was just a little too dominant, though. We went on into the top garden. I liked the uncompromising fat double sunflowers, grown in a row as if a vegetable. But one of the topiary yews is surely dying, if not dead. The old pear tree also rather beyond romantic. But the overall picture, for it is a picture, carefully composed, however it might appear otherwise, as enchanting as ever. Continuing, huge clumps of daisies and grasses made drama. As always there were plants and shrubs in flower that, despite countless visits, had apparently not been there before. But wasn’t it perhaps all a little brown and autumnal? A lot of the established trees and shrubs looked thin and weary. I couldn’t see the firm groupings of annuals grown for the late season such as had given the feeling of a garden at full throttle on 1st October last year.

The season is to blame, I’m sure. It’s been hot but also humid. There’s a lot of mould and leaf-spotting of various kinds. But I do hope Dixter isn’t short of money. Now that C.Lloyd is gone, has lucrative journalism and lecturing died with him?

‘Unkempt,’ a woman was saying on the lunch lawn. She meant praise. Another lady said, ‘Christopher Lloyd never had any children, did he?’ It was a mystery to her.

Let’s hope and pray for Dixter. Nature’s defects cannot wholly be assuaged by money, though, unless one is entirely indoors and not always then.