#SixonSaturday- Garden Tour results

 I've just returned from a lovely 4 night stop over in Suffolk at a place amazingly named Bradfield Combust, the second part after a fire in 1320, joined by friend Lyn, also an avid gardener, so no being hurried along, or comments like, not another garden!! We stayed in a self contained room at Church Farm, a fruit farm with endless supplies of strawberries and raspberries which formed part of our breakfasts each morning. The purpose of the trip was to visit as many gardens as possible, and there are plenty in that area, many around massive halls which seem all the rage in the area. From the more than six gardens visited, I've selected six photographs illustrating something meaningful from the trip. Why do we gardeners enjoy visiting gardens so much? For me it's to get inspiration, see how others have done things, identify new plants I'd like to buy for my garden and enjoy the display someone else has put on for visitors. It was also interesting to see how gardeners have got over the difficulty of gardens being past their mid summer peak, and not yet into autumnal flowering. Many gardens passed this test with flying colours by judicious pruning, and adding more plants, one other failed miserably, but I'm not naming names!

So where to start? I think Coton Manor was a very impressive garden which directed me towards giving plants more room, thinking about the requirements of each plant, and looking after it really carefully. I'll write posts on each of the visits, but today I'm distilling the best from the visits. Coton Manor Garden by the way won the nation's favourite garden award and has recently been featured in a programme with Carol Klein. The pots round the house at Coton Manor are stunning, with almost a national collection of pelargoniums, this pot attracted my attention because it takes the blue flowered, Convolvulus sabatius and uses it in a pot with a similar coloured nemesia to great effect:

Journeys at this time of year are a bit of a drag, we had to find a garden type place to stop for lunch on the journey and picked Aylett Nursery, although Lyn was a bit snooty because she thought it was a garden centre. In fact it's much more, they have a fantastic selection of tools, and anything else garden related you might want. The food is excellent, and there's also a great garden behind the centre, where there are long borders, masses of dahlias and a wild flower meadow. This dahlia, Magenta Magenta was fabulous

Seeing references to 'The Place for Plants' at East Bergholt in magazines, we thought we'd go there, and saw this tree with horse chestnut type leaves and these lovely flowers. I don't know what it is, but it appeared in various places.

Another fantastic garden, Fuller's Mill, is breathtaking, and an absolute must anytime you're in the Suffolk area. Booking is essential, and the 90 minutes we were allocated wasn't long enough to look round the garden, buy plants and have a pot of tea. I've chosen for my photos, one of the lilies around the garden. I would never have thought they could be used to such fantastically good effect.

I saw this hydrangea below in various gardens, looking particularly good in the tea gardens at Kentwell Hall

I love 'Annabel', but this might be the one I look out for to put in my garden. I think it might be paniculata 'Pinky Winky'

Other things to look out for at Kentwell Hall are the fabulous topiary figures based on the Pied Piper story which apparently take a week to trim each year, and the fabulous archways in the walled garden.

So there are my six, or seven if you're counting rigorously choices this week from various gardens. I'll get more photos of the gardens sorted out soon. Meanwhile time to head over to The Propagator and see what he's been up to this week.