With our stay at stunning Endsleigh at a close, we headed east towards our next three gardens: Forde Abbey, Sherborne Castle, and The Newt. But first we had to get out of Endsleigh, and that meant slowly driving on single track roads through rolling hills.
It was absolutely classic English countryside.
It was an effort not to stop every 10 feet to take a picture of another impossibly beautiful view.
About 60 miles later we arrived at Forde Abbey. Forde was built around 1130 as a Cistercian monastery. The original buildings were demolished when monasteries were disolved by the new Church of England in the 1500s.
The buildings now here were built as a private residence in the 1700s.
The gardens of Forde Abbey are one of the main attractions. They are listed in the National Heritage List for England as a “historically important garden”.
There are three large pools of water that descend down the hill with the gardens surrounding the pools.
The gardens were just beautiful and so well cared for.
Some of the trees are in the several hundred year age bracket.
Hard to believe but there are now more sequoias in England than there are in California.
From Forde Abbey we went to a place called Sherborne Castle & Gardens. Originally built by Sir Walter Raleigh as Sherborne Lodge, and extended in the 1620s, it stands in a 1,200-acre park which formed a small part of a much larger 15,000-acre estate.
After passing through Sherborne on the way to Plymouth, Sir Walter Raleigh fell in love with the castle, and Queen Elizabeth relinquished the estate, leasing it to Raleigh in 1592.
He then lost it in 1617 when he was imprisoned and it fell into the family that owns the castle and grounds today.
In the World War I the mansion was used by the Red Cross as a hospital, and in World War II it served as the headquarters for the commandos involved in the D-Day landings.
We are at Sherborne, however, because the gardens were designed by a very influential English garden designer named Capability Brown.
His style of smooth undulating grass, which would run straight to the house, clumps, belts and scatterings of trees and his serpentine lakes formed by invisibly damming small rivers were a new style within the English landscape, a “gardenless” form of landscape gardening, which swept away almost all the remnants of previous formally patterned styles.
He designed more than 170 parks, many of which survive today – including Blenheim from earlier in our trip. He was nicknamed “Capability” because he would tell his clients that their property had “capability” for improvement.
Our last stop of the day was at The Newt in Somerset. The Newt is an English country house where you can book a stay, but it is also surrounded by gardens created by Italo-French architect Patrice Taravella, who believes a garden should be both beautiful and useful.
Mixing ornamental and productive elements, the gardens are a feast for the eyes and stomach. At their core sits the Parabola, a walled garden concealing an apple tree maze; at their edges, diverse woodland providing a sheltered habitat for native wildlife.
All the food they grow at The Newt they use at the hotel and there are gardeners tending to their “kitchen garden” to support that aim.
They also have a short, but lovely, treetop serpentine that provides a beautiful overlook to the Somerset countryside.
From The Newt we headed into the New Forest where we will be spending the night at a famous hotel called The Pig.
