Maybe it's too early to making solid plans, maybe it's not. I've had a rough week, health-wise. But thinking about where I might go, when it becomes possible, that's a thing, surely?
So I found myself reading about Aberglasney and its extraordinary Ninfarium. Here's a little view of the gardens:
They're not far - in South Wales, and therefore both accessible as a fairly epic day trip, and as a practical, modern stately home - they also (ooh!) have rentable holiday space.
Our 1920s quarti is the end terrace of a four house block. Along the back of the houses runs a basic brick and beam columned colonnade, roofed in the same curvy red tiles as the rest of the house. Originally housing an outdoor toilet and providing clothes and firewood drying space, lots of them (ours included) got enclosed in the 70s-80s-90s-00s. This leaves the space more indoor than outdoor - warm enough for exotic plants, for example. But the exterior nature persists in a crittal window looking into the kitchen, a pebbledash back wall, a primitive raised floor, a certain improvisational feel. Often in Oxford these spaces - neither in nor outdoors - are called "garden rooms" and I've filled it with a lot of plants.
Not so many that they menace the cats and the drying washing - all spaces must fulfil multiple designations - so I will never be able to approach the plants-first brio of Aberglasney's exterior/interior spaces. But I'd like to see them; there's often interesting ideas about how things may grow more happily in limited spaces, vertically, together, luxuriantly, beautifully.
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