A visit to Harlow Carr is always a treat and the last time I visited was back in July 2019 when the sweet peas were in full bloom (that blog post is here). The trip I made yesterday was planned quite a while ago when Christine bought herself a membership to the RHS (which stands for Royal Horticultural Society - a very well know institution in the UK but if you aren't from this quirky little isle then you may not have heard of it). An RHS member can have unlimited visits to any one of the five RHS gardens in the UK and take a guest in free of charge. So being the wonderful friend that I am, I very kindly offered to be available at ANY time if she needed some accompaniment to Harlow Carr, or any other garden for that matter. We set a date, and I have been really looking forward to it for many weeks.
Harlow Carr is near Harrogate, so about a half hour drive from my house, making it a very easy day trip for us. We arrived around midday (of course we had to go out for breakfast first) and honestly I was so, so, so insanely happy about the weather that the gardens could have been half dead and I still would have been delighted with it. If you hadn't already gathered, the weather was absolute perfection. It was quite chilly (around 8 degrees I think) but the sky was completely free of clouds and the most gorgeous shade of clear blue, which meant that the sun shone it's little heart out all day.
We had a printed map to follow, but as I'd been before we just decided to work our way around on instinct, following the meandering pathways through the various different areas of the garden. In the summer the above bed is usually filled with meadow planting, and the amazing kinetic sycamore seed sculptures gently turn in the breeze above a sea of wild flowers. It looked a little sparse at this time of year but the sculptures were still lovely to watch.
I had been expecting colourful foliage in October and I was not disappointed - there was lots of it!
The grasses were also very beautiful and were incorporated into a lot of the large flower beds. I loved the combination above - the tall purple flower is Verbena Bonariensis and it looked wonderful planted with the yellow daisy flowers which are a variety of Rudbekia. Yellows and purples seemed to be a bit of a theme throughout the garden.....
....and the colour contrasts were very striking.
We continued to follow the winding pathways around ponds and flower beds, eventually finding our way into the more natural part of the gardens.
There is quite a bit of woodland at Harlow Carr....
....and in the early afternoon it was magical. The sunlight was beaming through the treetops, and it was so nice just to stroll along chatting and breathing in the fresh woodsy air.
Eventually the pathways lead us up to the kitchen garden which is one of may favourite parts.
The extreme orderliness of the raised beds is somehow very appealing to my brain, and I love that the beds themselves are made out of recycled plastic milk bottles, how brilliant is that?
There was still quite a lot of veg growing in the beds, but obviously this part of the garden is at it's very best in high summer. This is where you will find a lot of the sweet peas in summer, scrambling up and over those gorgeous rustic arbours.
There was still lots of colour though - a whole long row of neatly trained crab apple trees.....
.....and these amazing yellow flowers which must have stood about seven foot tall. I had to gently bend a stem down to take the above photograph. They look like dainty sunflowers, and I think they are in fact a perennial variety of sunflower.
I would love to grow some in my back yard - imagine that - seven or eight foot tall golden beauties right outside my window!
I showed you into this green house in yesterday's blog post - it was roped off so you couldn't venture inside, but the doors were open and it had been very beautifully staged for the season.
Just look how gorgeous it all is!! Pumpkins galore!!
There were lots of chillies too, and I loved the whole look of it in here.
We are entering the Sub Tropicana garden now which is full of exotic looking foliage and bold planting.
There were brightly coloured dahlias here (although not as many as I would have liked) and lots of different varieties of Salvia. In fact I noticed that there were salvias of all varieties in pretty much every part of the garden - they are easy to recognise because they have flowers that look like baby snapdragons, do you know what I mean? Salvias are a humungous plant group and if you search for them on the RHS plant finder thingy, there are over 2000 results. The ones we saw at Harlow Carr were mainly deep purples and very dark pinks and they really were gorgeous.
It's around 2pm now, and we've been walking and talking and oooooing and ahhhhhhing and taking umpteen photos for two solid hours. Time to find a bench in a sheltered sunny spot and have a bite to eat.....
.....doesn't this look yummy? Before setting off, we'd called into the farm shop to have our breakfast and pick up some lunch to take with us. I chose a vegetarian sausage roll with a filling of Mediterranean veggies and it was delish! We had some baby tomatoes on the vine, and some fruit for afterwards - a simple lunch really, because we were saving ourselves for a bit of an afternoon treat in the very well known Harlow Carr café (more of that in a bit).
After our rest and refreshment we were raring to go again, and set out to explore the main borders. These aren't like your average garden borders at home because of course they are completely ginormous, so the planting is equally ginormous in scale. In fact the borders were so big that it was hard to photograph them, they just wouldn't fit into the frame.
What I did do was take lots of pictures of the colours that I liked, building up a floral colour palette in my photo album...
....from the pale purple asters (of which there were many)....
....to the deep and gorgeous burnt oranges of the heleniums.
I really fell a bit in love with the heleniums, they looked so beautiful in the glow of the afternoon sun.
I took way more photos than I am showing you here, but I'm trying to be careful not to send you over the edge with too much floral abundance.
The last part of the garden we visited was one that I hadn't really seen a lot of in previous visits. I said to Christine that when you visit with Little People, you tend to have a different pace and different priorities. With children in tow, we would spend a lot of time playing in the woodland, and then time allowing the LP to run, run, run (and roll and cartwheel) across the wide open grassy spaces. By the time we got to the rock gardens, they would be a bit on the tired side and then it was all about wanting an ice cream, or a drink and something sugary to eat. So it was nice to be able to stroll slowly through this part, and it really is made for visiting in Autumn.
This area is called the Sandstone Rock Garden, and it's a mixture of giant sized rockery rocks, watery pools and the most beautiful shrubs and trees chosen especially for their foliage.
I mean, just look how beautiful it all is!
The blurb on the website describes this area as reaching "a crescendo of colour" in autumn and it wasn't wrong - there is a large collection of Japanese Maple trees here and the foliage was spectacular.
I hope you can tell from my photos how special this place is - the atmosphere is a curious mixture of highly energising and calmly relaxing and you can't help but feel hugely inspired by it all. I love that there are soooooooo many benches of all shapes and sizes positioned around the garden, inviting you to rest or simply stop and enjoy the nature surrounding you on all sides.
Of course our visit was hugely helped by the weather which was nothing short of perfection, we honestly couldn't believe our luck, especially after so many days of grey, wet weather earlier in the week.
It was quite honestly one of the nicest day trips I've had in a long time, well I would even rate it alongside my seaside jaunt which tells you just how happy it made me.
Now before we leave Harlow Carr, there is of course the pressing need for some top notch refreshment, and the café here is rather special. It is none other than a branch of the famous Betty's Tearooms and it is one refined and civilised place. A cup of tea is served to you quite literally on a silver platter with silver tea pots containing real leaf-tea which you must remember needs to be poured through a silver tea strainer. You must not forget this important fact, or your mouth will be full of leaves (please don't ask me how I know this).
Bettys is also famous for its baked goods, so we opted for a simple but very delicious toasted sultana scone to go with the tea. The toasting of a scone isn't something I've ever heard of before, but apparently it's a Bettys Speciality. It arrives already buttered so that the butter is completely soaked into the warmth of the scone, ooooooo, it's just melt in your mouth good. All very sophisticated and a very lovely way to end a sunny, colour-filled day.
I have decided that we must visit HC on a more frequent basis, because I would really like to see it change through the seasons. I imagine that even in winter there will be many delights, and oh, can you imagine Spring?? And early Summer?? Picnics on the grass, and some wonderful time idling amongst the flowers....I am all for it.
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I think the perennial sunflowers may in fact be Jerusalem artichokes, which are members of the sunflower family.
Posted by: Su | October 22, 2021 at 10:13 PM