The Gardens of Devon and Cornwall
Bed and Breakfast
| This is not intended as an exhaustive list of the many gardens worth visiting in the two counties, all within easy reach of Buckland. However there are several special gardens, and as many nurseries, which will provide many good excuses for garden visiting for anyone staying in the neighbourhood. | ||
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First, because nearest, is the Garden House. Now a garden trust, open daily in the season, this is an acclaimed and much-photographed garden a little over a mile away. It is worth the journey for any keen gardener, and its meadow plantings are spectacular. Further away, but again in the top flight, is the RHS garden at Rosemoor. This will take an hour and a quarter in the car, but it is a superb example of how to garden professionally, given skill, resources, and dedication. It can be combined with a visit to the Dartington Glass factory in nearby Great Torrington, as an antidote to too much garden visiting. | |
| The National Trust has an atmospheric property at Cotehele on the Cornish bank of the Tamar, twenty minutes away. The house has never had electricity installed, and is a lovely example of a yeoman manor house, but the garden is worth a visit in its own right, especially in Spring, when the collection of daffodils bred in the Tamar Valley is in flower |  |
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Endsleigh House is further up river from Cotehele, again about twenty minutes away. The landscape was laid out on a grand scale by Humphrey Repton in the eighteenth century for the then Duke of Bedford and the views are magical. There are magnificent old trees in the valley above the house, and the whole place, including Repton's great terrace overlooking the river, has benefited in the last year or two from much restoration. | |
| The National Trust has properties at Anthony, just over the river in Cornwall, and at Saltram outside Plymouth. An interesting trip is also to take the Cremyll ferry from Plymouth across the Sound to the great park and garden at Mount Edgecombe, now in the hands of Plymouth City Council. Here there is the national collection of camellias, among other things, such as striking mature Paulownia trees in May. |  |
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The Eden Project is also about an hour and a half away near St Austell. Very few of our guests are not excited by its vision, its engineering, and its scale. It, too, is worth the journey. | |
| Morwellham Quay is not a garden, but it was in fact the first 'Living history' Museum. It is very close by on the Devon bank of the Tamar, and it owes its existence to the fact that the river was tidal right up to this point, enabling quite large boats to come up and to load copper ore from the Devon Great Consols copper mine. You can visit the quayside, see how life was lived in a Victorian industrial community, and travel through a copper mine on a small train. |  |
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