Carole Drake Garden Photos

29/04/2026

Spent a very enjoyable afternoon yesterday photographing geums near Bath, the collection of enthusiast Maria Heffer. In spite of a fresh breeze I got some nice shots. This beauty is Geum 'Fireball', a delicious orange, semi-double variety, and like most geums, a prolific bloomer!

23/04/2026

19/02/2026

I'm totally besotted by Salix gracilistyla 'Mount A*o', a beacon of hope amidst the seemingly endless gloom, and keep having to go into my garden to spend time with it, looking very closely at its dreamy fluffy pink catkins and touching them too.... oops!

Named after a Japanese volcano second in size only to Mount Fuji, its flowers, not quite open yet will provide valuable nectar and pollen for invertebrates as do many other willows. What's not to like???

21/11/2025

10/09/2025

I can't think of another plant that's gone from zero to hero in the way that dahlias have over the last thirty years or so. When my Nan grew them in her Dorset garden in the 1960s and 70s, interspersed with canes topped with clay pots stuffed with newspaper to catch the earwigs that munched holes in the flower buds, they were seen as old-fashioned and gaudy. They may still seem gaudy to some, but they're at the height of fashion nowadays, in more subtle shades perhaps than in the past, at home in all sorts and styles of gardens, in pots or in the ground, great mixers, wonderful cut flowers, little masterpieces of geometry and even edible!

Despite their not being so good for pollinators as the single flowered forms, I do have a penchant for pompons and balls...  what's your favourite form? Waterlily, cactus, anemone, collarette or decorative? There are so many to choose from.

These beauties were shot at Corsley House in Wiltshire last September which features in the current issue of The English Garden magazine. Clockwise from top left: peony form 'Bishop of Llandaff'; star form 'Verrone's Obsidian'; ball form 'Zundert Mystery Fox',  waterlily form 'Sam Hopkins'; decorative form 'David Howard'; single form 'Schipper's Bronze'.

20/08/2025

Captivating Castle Rings, small yet beautifully formed, is open for the National Garden Scheme on Sunday 24th August 2-5... one of my current favourite gardens it's slotted between a quiet road and the bank of an iron age hill fort. Made by Michael Thomas and Struan Reid it's a jewel of a garden, a structure of clipped evergreens set with intensely coloured seasonal flowers, at this time of year including deep red dahlias, glowing orange tagetes and sultry bronze ricinus. Mikey is the skilled hands-on gardener, once head gardener at Englefield House in Berkshire; Struan injects brilliant design ideas... he wrote a thesis on garden metalwork for his MA in garden history: they make a great team.

Though technically inside the Wiltshire border, Castle Rings is just west of Shaftesbury in north Dorset, amongst the Donheads, a cluster of pretty villages. There are beautiful views towards Win Green too.

Entry is just £5, a bargain considering some of the entrance charges I've paid to visit larger yet less interesting and less well maintained gardens this year... grumble grumble

07/08/2025

An old hall boasting a fabulous modern garden… The fourth of 2025’s HHA Garden of the Year nominees I’ve shot is Wollerton Old Hall in Shropshire, the creation of Lesley and John Jenkins, a formal garden of three acres wrapped around a C16th house. Its lucid design, a sequence of distinct garden rooms, is full of exuberant planting, bursting with colour, scent, shape and texture in summer and well into autumn. The shots here are from May last year when I dropped in while in the area shooting the garden at Preen Manor. Wollerton was looking predominantly green, with notable highlights such as the white wisteria in the Rill Garden. It’s a garden full of exquisite compositions, a dream for a photographer.

The other shortlisted gardens are Arundel Castle Gardens, Hestercombe Gardens, Hole Park, Iford Manor, Lowther Castle and Gardens, Penshurst Place and Gardens, Raby Castle, Park and Gardens. You can vote for your favourite on the Historic Houses Association website: www.historichouses.org

22/07/2025

The third of 2025's HHA Garden of the Year nominees I've shot is Lowther Castle in Cumbria. I was thrilled to get a close up look at this Sleeping Beauty of a place because I remember seeing it from a distance on childhood holidays in the Lakes, looking completely overgrown and scary like something out of one of the darker Gothic fairy tales, perhaps retold by the late great Angela Carter. What a transformation! Dan Pearson has been instrumental in bringing it back to life in collaboration with the Lowther Castle and Gardens Trust, weaving in contemporary design while peeling back layers to reveal its previous incarnations. A palimpsest: something comprised of distinct layers accumulating to the present, glimpses of the past seen through more recent patterns, plants and ideas.

BTW when I was shooting the garden I was trying out a new model of quick release tripod head that I'd just bought, and at one point my camera seemed to somersault out of it... very luckily I caught it! Needless to say I went back to my tried and trusted old one after that...

The other shortlisted gardens are Arundel Castle Gardens, Hestercombe Gardens, Hole Park, Iford Manor, Penshurst Place and Gardens, Raby Castle, Park and Gardens and Wollerton Old Hall Garden. You can vote for your favourite on the Historic Houses Association website: www.historichouses.com

06/06/2025

The second of 2025’s HHA Garden of the Year Award nominees I’ve had the pleasure to photograph is Iford Manor, near Bradford-on-Avon, the former home of architect and garden designer Harold Peto. Since 1964 it has been owned by the Cartwright-Hignett family, and today William and Marianne Cartwright-Hignett care for this very special place while sensitively renewing it, ably assisted by head gardener Steve Lannin and his team.

In 1898, the year before Peto bought Iford Manor, he undertook a mammoth journey around the world which included a ten week stay in Japan. In his diary he wrote: ‘Decidedly I will never undertake a long journey again.... Far wiser to stay mostly at home and ‘cultivate your garden’.... read about far-distant places and visit them in imagination... and appreciate the delights which are at hand...’

What finer place to ‘cultivate your garden’ than deep in a secretive English valley around a honey-coloured seventeenth century manor house with a handsome Palladian facade? On 2 ½ acres of mostly sloping ground Peto created an intensely atmospheric ‘hanging garden’ suffused with his love of Italy though equally enthralled by its setting: the River Frome meandering through the valley bottom; lush woodland all around; wide pastoral views.

It would be a worthy winner. Is it your choice?

The other shortlisted gardens are: Arundel Castle Gardens, Hestercombe Gardens, Hole Park, Lowther Castle, Penshurst Place and Gardens, Raby Castle, Park and Gardens and Wollerton Old Hall Garden. You can vote for your favourite on the Historic Houses Association website.

09/05/2025

More shots of the magnificent Old Rectory, Netherbury, Dorset, Simon and Amanda Mehigan's home, for sale through Savills, a garden that looks fabulous all year round with its structural planting... across the seasons the evergreens frame a succession of flowery pictures including masses of self-seeded bulbs and wild flowers including snowdrops, cyclamen, species tulips, camassias and narcissi.

The bog garden is a highlight in May, the damp ground a lush mosaic of moisture loving plants including primulas, rodgersia, ferns, hostas and willows. Summer flowering magnolias are another highlight such as Magnolia wilsonii, favoured by Amanda because, unlike spring flowering species, they won't get damaged by frost.

A garden of such riches, let's hope it finds a worthy buyer...

15/08/2024

I'm very fond of this exuberant Clematis 'Bill MacKenzie', billowing over a wall at the top of the High Street in Wincanton and always look forward to seeing it, especially at a time when many other plants have run out of puff. Its deliciously silky seedheads are almost better than the rich yellow nodding flowers, but in combination they add up to a sensational plant... and of course don't forget the ferny foliage. Yep I've talked myself into getting one to festoon my Venetian fence... it will sit well beside the golden hop.