A few stolen hours in Edinburgh make travel chaos worth while

Any frequent business traveller will tell you that the hassle far outstrips the occasional perk of a nice expense account dinner or a drive by foreign hot spots. But if you don’t get to travel much in your job, then the rare work-related jaunt can be a thing of immense excitement. 

Perhaps even enough to overshadow all the meetings, the train strike that forced me to drive to the airport, the 6.5 hour delay on the outbound flight, the inconveniently scheduled return at 7:15 on a Friday night, the 45-minute delay on that departure, and the M3 shutdown that meant my 40-minute drive home took 90. 

But in exchange I got Edinburgh. 

We smashed all of our business objectives and I, thanks to the inconveniently-scheduled homeward flight, was able to grab 4.5 hours for myself to ramble around one of the world’s greatest Georgian cities beneath clement skies that made everything look postcard-perfect. 

(And lest you think I was skiving, I made up almost every minute of the time working in the airport and on the flight home. No rest for the wicked.)

There are, of course, plenty of things to do in this ancient city that aren’t Georgian. A first time-tourist would probably stroll up the hugely picturesque Royal Mile to visit the castle. I’ve done that enough times to know it’s one of those castles that’s actually a lot more dramatic inside than out. I seriously considered Holyrood, the Queen’s official palace in Scotland. There’s both history and more bang for your art and interiors buck there, and I haven’t been inside for at least 20 years. I decided I wanted to do something entirely new to me, however, so headed for The Georgian House on Charlotte Square. 

The walk through Edinburgh’s New Town to get there was as good as the attraction. 

By the middle of the 18th century the city, then confined to the medieval footprint stretching from the castle to Holyrood, was bursting at its dank, dangerous seams. Meanwhile, Scots were playing an ever-increasing role in the politics and culture of the still newly-United Kingdom. They wanted a capital that matched their contribution in the Age of Enlightenment. They also wanted to affirm their loyalty to the king in London after the Scottish-based rebellion in 1745. The result was a massive, gracious, purpose-built urban expansion running on a parallel hill to the Old Town. The architectural style matched what was going on in London, Bath and Dublin, while all the street names broadcast allegiance to the throne. 

George Street runs along the crest of the New Town’s hill, with views of the Old Town and the castle to the south and down to the Firth of Forth to the north. On a sunny day, with the whole scene framed by blue skies, blue waters and green hills, it’s one of the best settings for an urban walk in Europe. The buildings along this double-width avenue are almost entirely neo-classical; some have the restrained dignity of Tuscan villas, others the Baroque embellishment of palaces. Edinburgh may be known as the Athens of the North, but George Street sweeps you away to Italy. Anglo-Saxon restraint keeps things from getting out of control, however. 

There’s an amusing “compare and contrast” to be had if you wander into the church of St. Andrew’s and St. George’s and picture it beside San’Andrea al Quirinale in Rome. The churches share an unusual oval footprint, they both look back to Greek and Roman design, and the Roman St. Andrew’s is home to Scotttish Catholics in that city, but there all similarities stop. While the Roman church is a breath-stealing, gold encrusted exercise is excess, the Scottish church is restrained, elegant and mostly white, its only exuberance being colourful Robert Adam-style plasterwork on its ceiling. 

As the most famous architect of the age and a Scot by birth, it’s no surprise that Adam’s influence is felt here though his actual contribution is limited. What he did, however, it arguably the most beautiful bit of the whole New Town. Adam designed Charlotte Square along the same lines as Paris’ Place des Vosges, with individual residences blending into what appears to be a single, unified palace. The north and south sides have grand central pediments, while the west is centred on a domed church, now the Scottish National Records Office. (It’s not by Adam, but fits seamlessly into the scheme.) The park in the middle is a private one for residents only, but is mostly just green lawn, making the building facades look even better.

The Georgian House is at No. 7, originally purchased and furnished by the chief of Clan Lamont and now in the hands of the National Trust for Scotland. (National Trust for England and Wales cards are honoured here.) Like the castle, the exterior is a bit more impressive than the interior, but if you’re a fan of the Georgians and Robert Adam it’s a fascinating comparison to his English work. While the classic lines, familiar motifs, sash windows and grand stairs are here, everything is smaller and simpler. The staircase with its oval skylight at the top is the only one in the house; no separate servants’ option here. There are no flamboyant Adam plaster ceilings. Each floor has just two main rooms. 

In stark contrast to the usual Georgian townhouse plan, houses here followed a Scottish tradition of keeping a combined audience and bedchamber on the ground floor next to the dining room. Above, a drawing room stretches the width of the house at the front while a library sits behind it. Bedrooms would have been on upper floors. These aren’t restored to Georgian times but used as galleries for temporary exhibitions and as a cinema room where you can watch an excellent film about life in the house in Lord Lamont’s time. It would have been the height of luxury in turn of the 19th-century Edinburgh, but would have come across as a distinct step down from townhouses in London or Bath. (No. 1 Royal Crescent in Bath, also restored and open as a museum, is probably the Georgian House’s most direct tourism contemporary in England.) I wonder if Nicola Sturgeon, whose official residence is in Bute House next door, notices and adds the inferiority to her list of grievances against the English?

At the other end of George Street there’s another square, St. Andrew’s, and No. 39 there can keep up with anything in London. Although that may be due to its origin 80 years later as a bank headquarters rather than as a private home. Now it’s the sumptuous Gleneagles Townhouse, urban outpost of the famous golfing resort. This isn’t the kind of place one gets put up in on business trips … the website doesn’t even list prices for its exquisitely appointed rooms … but you can make reservations to dine here or even, as we did, get lucky and slip in for a table in the bar for drinks. Both restaurant and bar are in what was the main hall of the bank, with towering marble columns, grand fireplaces and a coved ceiling offering heroes of Scotland in high relief amongst decorative swirls. 

My lodgings were in the far more sensible Apex Hotel at Waterloo place, which had none of Gleneagles’ opulence but everything you really care about when travelling on business: quiet rooms with effective, individually-controlled heating and air conditioning, a great bed, an indoor pool and gym with long hours so you have some chance of squeezing some exercise into your day, and a quiet restaurant with a broad, practical menu that allows you to get something to eat on your own without a big fuss at the end of the day. It’s also exceptionally well located, just a few minutes’ stroll from both the train station and the terminus of the tram line in from the airport. (At £9 for an open-ended return on a gleaming, air-conditioned tram that glides you from point-to-point with hardly a bump, this has to be one of the best deals in public transport in the UK.)

A few other points to note from my visit:

St. James Quarter is a glistening new, galleria-inspired shopping centre just north of the main train station. In my youth, this was a downmarket area where you could find B&Bs for £6 a night where you fed 20 pence coins into the radiator for some feeble warmth to keep the ancient cold at bay. That’s all been swept away for upscale brands and dining variety. I might be distressed at losing all that historic architecture if they hadn’t done the new stuff so well, and if it wasn’t completely surrounded by historic neighbourhoods in great shape. 

The Everyman Cinema within the mall is purpose built, a divergence from the chain’s usual approach of re-working  historic buildings. They’ve retained the sofa seating, however, and doubled down on the whole nightclub cum cinema vibe. There are two floors of dining and drinking area here to augment the screening rooms. Which made it a fabulous venue for a corporate event, with presentations in the cinema and drinks afterwards in the upper lounge, set aside for private use.

The Scottish National Gallery, like all of the UK’s national museums, is free to enter. It’s also tiny. Which makes it a fabulous stop if you’re walking on nearby Princes Street. Head to the back building for the core of the collection, displayed in six galleries that circle one floor of what appears to be a Greek temple. The collection may be small but the masterpiece percentage is high, with works from Botticelli, Raphael, Titian, El Greco, Velázquez, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Gainsborough, Constable, Turner and more. There’s even an exquisite little DaVinci, the Madonna of the Yarnwinder. But for me, the star sight is Landseer’s Monarch of the Glen, which has always seemed to me to be the essence of Scotland on canvas.

The Eastern European pop giving atmosphere to Miros Cantina Mexicana, didn’t undermine the experience in this delightful little find on Rose Street, a lane of eclectic restaurants between the better-known Princes and George Streets. Despite the vast diversity of people and cuisines in the UK, Mexican is  rarely done well here. I’d have been ecstatic to find this near me. Instead, succulent carnitas tacos and cold beer added to the perfection, if not the Georgian theme, of my Edinburgh afternoon of escape.

Did you know that the Walter Scott Memorial, ground zero for sightseeing in Edinburgh, is the largest monument in the world dedicated to a writer? And they commemorated the man for eternity with one of his favourite dogs by his side. Makes me want to dust off my copy of Waverley and tuck in once more.

West Green stages a welcome return to early opera

Greatest hits are well served by the English country house opera scene, which seems to be growing every year. Early music, however, rarely gets a look in. Our beloved Longborough tends to devote one of its four annual performances to this period, but many others can easily go several seasons without attempting anything before Mozart.

It’s not a surprise. The musicians and the singers tend to be specialists, less abundant than the mainstream. Plots are often based on Greek and Roman mythology; a knowledge of which was once synonymous with education, but no more.  Critically, most of these venues operate on a shoe string. They have to sell out to break even. Yet another Traviata is more likely to shift tickets than Acis and Galatea.

So well done to West Green House for putting on not just the aforementioned Handel Opera, but a whole early music evening luxuriating in the rich melodies of Dowland, Daniel, Ferrabosco, and Purcell.

West Green is an intimate music venue, with performances on pop-up stages and marquees within the garden rather than in a permanent building. This was even more so than usual, with guests at tables arranged cafe style in a marquee with an open back looking across the lawn at the beautiful late-17th century facade of the house. 

We started with an hour of lute and theorbo (an ancient guitar with a preposterously long neck) music before dinner, accompanied by a soprano. Then a wander through West Green's famous walled gardens to the greenhouses for a two-course meal. It was an elegant and very English affair of poached salmon followed by strawberries and pana cotta, eaten beneath a sprawling grape vine, shelves of blooming geranium and hot house stunners.

There was a bit more time to wander through the gardens, struggling a bit through the dog days of late July, when the roses and early summer blooms have gone over and the dahlias aren't fully out yet. The freakishly dry weather hasn't helped either, of course. But there's still enough to make any gardener happy and West Green is worth a garden visit at any time of the year. You don't have to wait for a musical performance to come here, It's a National Trust property. Then it was back to the marquee for a full programme of Purcell with a quintet on historic instruments and four singers. There were probably only 60-80 in the audience, adding to the feeling of a private party rather than a concert.

The small audience didn't equate to small talent on stage, however. Quite the oppose. Soprano Miriam Allan gained national fame singing at the Duke of Edinburgh's funeral. Elizabeth Kenny is billed as England's most celebrated lutenist, and pops up regularly on YouTube in performances from this era. The women work magic together; clear, high voice weaving in and out of the rich, sultry strings. We could have been Elizabethan courtiers nodding off in the contentment of a summer revel.

Kenny and Allan joined the larger group for the evening performance, led from the harpsichord by Christopher Bucknall. His is another name that turns up a lot in these circles. 

I honestly don't understand why Purcell isn't performed more. Some Baroque music is difficult, overly morose or too complex for relaxed enjoyment. The superstar of the late Stuart court was none of these things. (OK, you might not want to listen to Dido and Aeneas as a pick-me-up.) Cheerful, toe-tapping melodies pervade. There are themes and snippets that will remind you strongly of folk music, especially from the violins; unsurprising as that genre and its fiddles are a direct and close descendant of the popular music of the late 16th and early 17th centuries. When Purcell blends multiple voices, as in the evening's climactic performance of Thus Happy We Are, he anticipates the virtuoso quartets of Mozart.

The singers brought lovely snippets of acting into their performance to add humour and a bit of drama, but this was a recital and not a staged opera. The programme included music from The Fairy Queen (occasionally performed, on Longborough's docket next year), King Arthur (I've never spotted a performance) and Diocletian (I didn't know it existed). Given my love of historical epics I would probably lap these up. 

Given the number of seats still available at the Early Music Night, however, I don't predict a major surge of 17th century opera at West Green, or anywhere else. We fans will have to be satisfied with the rare and wonderful opportunities when they come. 

Country walk with a majestic falcon makes a memorable birthday treat

To give is proverbially better than to receive. It's a point proven in abundance on a Hampshire Hawk Walk, both because it's a unique experience for tough-to-buy-for loved ones, and because the giver has almost as much fun as the celebrant.

This is a one-on-one experience, as opposed to the small group outings that seem to be more common when you start searching for falconry experiences. We met falconer Anita Ebdon and her Harris hawk, Guinness, on the front lawns of Chawton House, a stately home in North Hampshire. From its gardens we set off for a 90-minute ramble around adjacent meadows and woods. The birthday boy got to don a falconer’s glove straight away, and from then on Guinness was landing on his outstretched arm rather than Anita’s.

We’ve seen a fair number of birds of prey exhibitions, from the lavish spectacular at Warwick Castle to humble demonstrations at our local horse trials. And while we’ve enjoyed them all, when you strip them back to their basics they feature birds flying back and forth in a defined space. A Hawk Walk is totally different. 

Over the course of about a mile, we walked and Guinness followed. At regular intervals, Anita dipped into  the bag at her hip and extracted a tasty morsel of raw rabbit meat which she then balanced on the side of my husband’s outstretched, gloved fist. Within a few seconds, Guinness would come swooping in for his snack. The further we got into the walk, the more comfortable the hawk became with my husband, so that near the end he wouldn’t just eat and run, but stay on Piers’ arm a bit as we walked. The technique’s not so different from walking a dog off-lead, but the birds are a good deal more majestic. (Sorry, Bruno.)

Alternating between meadow and forest is an inspired combination. When you’re in the meadow, the hawk retreats to the trees at its edge, his exceptional vision never losing you even though you don’t have a clue where he’s gone. when his snack comes out, though, you’re treated to long, majestic and slightly unnerving glides as he plunges towards his objective. If you ever wondered why most fighter jets are named after birds of prey, this will resolve the question for you.

The woodlands were even better. Under the canopy Guinness stayed closer to us, and was easier for us to pick out as the jingle of his bell wasn’t lost on the wind. He’d move tree to tree, always keeping us in sight. Again, when the treat came out he’d make his move, now showing off precision flying as he wove through branches and trunks at high speed, approaching at a much lower level than out in the open air. Several times, as the trailing photographer, I had the thrill of him skimming within inches of me, a blur of chocolate and sienna feathers and a blast of cool air.

The visceral excitement of getting that close to a top predator at work is accompanied by informative commentary from Anita who, as you’d expect, is a font of knowledge on her own Harris hawks (Guinness is one of a team of seven), as well as other birds of prey, the history of falconry, and the countryside through which you’re walking. She even helped us spot a rare Chalk Hill Blue butterfly flitting through the dancing grasses of the late summer meadow. Impossible to photograph, delightful to watch.

Anita’s home base means you can combine your Hawk Walk with other local attractions for a rich day in the countryside. Chawton might have rung a bell for the literary amongst you; the manor house was the home of Jane Austen’s brother and she lived the last nine (and most productive) years of her life in a cottage at the centre of the tiny village at the estate’s edge. Both the manor and Jane’s house are open to the public. Even if you’re not a Jane Austen fan, you’ll be fascinated to observe her worshippers (aka Janeites) who treat their house visit like the culmination of a holy pilgrimage. If nature is more your thing, a few miles further on lovely country lanes takes you to Gilbert White’s house. The 18th century parson is considered England’s first ecologist and his Natural History of Hampshire shaped many scientists to come, including Darwin. His lovely, tastefully restored home sits in protected meadows and woodlands open to walkers, and the adjacent village of Selborne is one of Hampshire’s prettiest.

We opted for a pre-walk Sunday lunch at the Rose and Crown in Upper Farringdon. Yet another example of the kind of gastropub we wish someone would transform one of our four locals into. Charming historic exterior, interiors maintaining that dark wood, old-world feel but elevated with tasteful touches of modern design, mellow music at a background volume, an interesting and well-priced wine list and a menu that celebrates local producers and seasonal choices. It being a Sunday, the menu was all about the traditional roast, with generous slices of succulent meats, rich gravy and Yorkshire puddings the size of a baby’s head. 

Anita’s Hawk Walks start at £90 for the participant and one companion, with additional observers possible for an added fee. Find out more here. A word of warning: because these are individual walks and she only does three a day, she books up well in advance. If you want to match your experience to a particular date, planning three to six months in advance would be sensible.

To see the Instagram reel I put together from the walk, follow this link.

Longborough's Carmen nears perfection; the hunt for a perfect Cotswold home struggles

Earlier this week I was in a heated debate about race and casting. It’s an incendiary topic, with one extreme demanding colour-blind, rainbow-spectrumed variety for every role, whatever its provenance or history, while the other bristles at any deviation from the historical record or the original environment of the author. From Hamilton to Bridgerton, and scores of less renown productions, playing with original source material to infuse modern sensibilities has become de rigueur.

I’m not sure it’s that new a trend. Medieval mystery plays popularised, and messed with, 1,000-year-old bible stories. Shakespeare wreaked havoc with his source material. Western art portrayed historic scenes in contemporary costume until the 19th century. But I doubt creative changes have ever been so politically charged as they are in this woke age.

Longborough’s production of Carmen will stir up purists on this front. The revisions here aren’t about race but about overturning late 19th century attitudes towards women. The traditional Carmen is a violent, manipulative seductress who embodies all of the Victorian era’s fear of strong, sexually active women. Our hearts are supposed to lie with the  the manipulated hero Don Jose, a noble but weak fool destroyed by his unrequited love. 

Though it keeps the words and music the same, Longborough’s staging and acting turn the story on its head. Carmen is a likeable, modern woman who plays the field. In this production she and her friends work in a meat packing plant rather than the cigarette factory, a subtle change that made them objects of exploitation rather than sexual appeal. Carmen appeared honestly in love with Don Jose until he got too clingy, and tries to get him to go back to the life he’s more suited to when their relationship cools. Jose becomes violently obsessed, and suddenly the old story becomes a modern one of a deranged stalker murdering his innocent victim.

This doesn’t entirely work. You can’t edit out, or forget, the fact that Carmen carves a cross into a girl’s forehead in a workplace fight to start the opera’s chain of events. Or that she’s a leader in a criminal underworld, deploying the sexual favours of her girl gang to corrupt the authorities. But with a bit of suspension of belief, a more sympathetic Carmen and a more psychotic Jose make for a more interesting and credible plot to modern eyes. Anyone raised Catholic will have a special, though uncomfortable, understanding of the way the flower Carmen originally uses to seduce Don Jose becomes a stigmata when he sews it into his hand, and bleeds when he tries to rip it out. Peter Gijsbertsen's excellent acting combined with his fine tenor to give us the most believeable ... and certainly the most insane ... Don Jose I've seen.

But Longborough's twist on the plot is most reliant on its Carmen.  Mezzo-soprano Margaret Plummer was fiery, sexy, likeable, kind-hearted, tough, and carried off some of opera's greatest arias with aplomb. We were lucky to see her and the rest of the cast in action; Covid had swept through the performers and ours was the first time in a week of attempts they'd been able to muster the whole cast and deliver director Mathilde Lopez' vision.

Together with Siegfried earlier this summer, the duo may represent the best Longborough season we've seen in years. Next year brings Gotterdamerung plus Donizetti's Elixir of Love, Purcell's Fairy Queen and Monteverdi's L'Orfeo, It will be the first season in years we'll be properly torn on which to put on the short list. We can stretch to three weekends in the Cotswolds but four is a bit profligate, and complicated by our continuing search for a new home-away-from-home since our favourite B&B closed down. My dream is to find a place in Stow we could rent for a week or even two at a time, working from the Cotswolds, going to the opera, and getting a sense of what the town might be like as a retirement location. But we've yet to find the right venue.

Our Seigfried weekend saw us at The Stag at Stow. Right on the main market square, dog friendly with a generously-sized double bedroom, beautifully decorated and with both patio dining and a large beer garden, delicious breakfast and an excellent restaurant for dinner, it now stands at the top of our B&B league table for the area. It doesn't have a comfortable indoor lounge area for residents besides its pub, however, and room rates start at around £270 per night ... making it impractical for a whole week.

We went for the apartment option this past weekend. Church Suite is one of five flats carved out of the old Methodist church on Sheep Street. It's beautifully designed, with a bedroom and bath in a loft and sitting room and kitchen below, a large light well running the full height of the unit to show off one of the old windows. The design can make the sitting room feel a bit claustrophobic, but overall it's a lovely place and in spotless shape except for an otherwise uncharacteristic bit of mould in the shower grouting. Like the Stag, the central location means that you're within walking distance of all the dining and shopping options, though during the day you do have to move your car every two hours (or park on the outskirts). The real problem here, however, is that the WiFi was terrible. We could never work from here. And Church Suite is almost as expensive as The Stag; £398 for two nights, but without breakfast. While the living space would be better than the Stag's for a full week, I'd like a better price.

The Beautiful Little House, about 300 metres further away from the centre of town than Church Suite, was our home for a whole week last year, and was by far the best deal of the lot with the price for the week at under £600 and parking on the street outside. The house lacked the boutique hotel decor of both The Stag and Church Suite, but it offered a lot more space with a separate kitchen and sitting room, two bedrooms upstairs and an outdoor, walled patio. As with the other two, it's dog friendly. It had great WiFi. The problem? My husband is a delicate sleeper and had issues with the mattress. So while I'd like to head back there and book it for longer stretches of the summer, it's a no from him. And thus our Cotswolds search continues...

RA Summer Exhibition and Hampton Court: Shared theme, very different moods

 Gardeners are instinctive optimists. The act of planting a tiny seed in March in hope of abundance six months later is annual proof. Artists are inspired by nature, too, but this year’s Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, themed on climate, shows the artists on the pessimistic end of the spectrum.

About 40 percent of the work on display seethed with anger, while an equal number projected a deep melancholy. This being Great Britain, much of the negativity was infused with black humour, but it was still all a bit grim. A small, remaining percentage of the work celebrated the joy of what the climate brings us, and inspired change to protect it. 

Meanwhile, 14 miles west, another staple of the London season was far more cheerful. The Hampton Court Garden Festival celebrated urban micro-gardens, water saving, compost and bug houses, thronged with crowds who clearly believe their personal actions can make a difference … even if the blazing heat causing the gardens to droop was punishing proof of climate change.

I was fortunate to attend both in the same week, and enjoyed the contrast. In addition to sharing a theme this year, both are essentially big market places: new art in Piccadilly, plants and garden kit at the palace. But you have to be a lot richer to do any buying at the Royal Academy.

Had money been no object, my choice at the Exhibition would have been Jess de Wahls’ Nevertheless, she persisted, a work of embroidery roughly a metre square. At the top, an idyllic world lives under a golden dome of honeycomb, patrolled by protective bees. But at the mid point, one of their number struggles, and below him is a world of death. (Or is it her? The she of the title being the queen bee struggling to survive?) The contrast and vivid detail reminded me of those scenes that contrast heaven and hell with such drama in medieval Italian churches, and the sheer skill of the embroidery was masterful. In concept and execution, I can see (just about) spending £85,000 to take this one home, should I be the type of person to have that kind of cash.

One of the great delights of the Exhibition, of course, is wandering the galleries pretending you have untold millions to invest in art. What would you buy? There’s a lot of conceptual stuff here that falls into my  “you’re pulling my leg” category. Such as a page from a digital notepad, with some signatures on it, blown up to enormous size and called They came out of nowhere pointing to nowhere he said / Visitor book painting. Creator Ryan Gander (I can’t bring myself to award him the adjective artist) has the chutzpah to put a £90,000 price tag on this one.

Equally perplexing, though at least more attractive to have on a wall, was an oversized canvas of vegetables rendered in blocks of solid, bold colours. A quick hour on the computer for the corporate designers I work with, but Sir Michael Craig-Martin, a fully-accredited Royal Academician, is charging £69,500 for Untitled (with 2 carrots). To each his own.

While there’s plenty of this kind of thing to puzzle over (a bear sculpted of black fibre mauling Pinocchio, a child’s drawing of a football ground, four heads hanging from a triangular flood sign graffitied to say blood), there are bits and pieces of beauty throughout to captivate even the most passionate critic of modern art. A pair of masterful, large watercolours of the Grand Canyon with soil samples set in glass tubes within the mount to demonstrate the exact colours of reality, and how perfectly artist Tony Foster got to them, seemed excellent value for millionaire’s money at £72,500. (Should you be in the market, it’s called Hot and Dry / Hot and Wet - Grand Canyon rim to river/ 18 days)

I was intrigued by the old-meets-new conjunction of Rob and Nick Carter’s Transforming flowers in a vase. At first glance, in frame, subject matter and style it’s an old Dutch master still life of a vase of spring flowers. Only on close inspection do you realise it’s a photographic image. Even closer inspection tells you it’s not a  photo, but a film. The flowers slowly wither and die over the course of the 70-minute film, only to be regenerated to fresh perfection on a loop. This seemed a bargain at £30,000, and one I suspect many of those attending the Hampton Court Garden Festival would happily snap up if they had the cash.

But while Hampton Court is indeed a festival of shopping, an attendee would be hard pressed to spend £30,000 on anything. Maybe a posh conservatory or an enormous metal sculpted tree that’s also a fountain. But pleasures are more humble here. My most extravagant purchase was £30 on a single plant. Hosta Liberty is a new introduction with long stems, large leaves and a colour palette that turns from golden yellow to ivory cream as it matures. Not quite as much of a transformation as the Carters’ video, but at one thousandth of the price, how could I resist? It’s already planted out into my hosta bed (the tallest one in the centre) and will no doubt be its crowning glory.

Regular readers may remember that the Festival (re-branded from the Hampton Court Flower Show in 2019) has been an annual outing for me and the same two friends since 2010, and over that time our priorities have shifted more to the annual catch up than to display gardens. Which is a good thing, since there are a lot less of them here than there used to be.

I don’t know whether it’s a planned shift, or the lack of corporate sponsorship post pandemic, but the show gardens were so small and sparse to be mostly forgettable. The notable exception was a Ukrainian garden, where grasses and plants were starting to come back around the burned shell of a Ukrainian house. Another parallel to the Summer Exhibition here: powerful messaging but nothing I was planning to take home.

Corporate sponsors seem to have disappeared almost completely to be replaced by charities, whose gardens tend to concentrate more on getting a message across (like this year’s Alzheimer’s garden with a fibrous, menacing web of black stuff hanging over its paths) than innovative planting schemes, new plants or the latest trends in colour. We simply weren’t interested enough to give much of our attention to any. Admittedly, the fact that there wasn’t a cloud in the sky nor a hint of breeze and the temperature was pushing 30C discouraged us, as well.

We found the greatest interest, and creativity, in a series of allotment gardens. One devoted to menopause education, planted with herbs that support women’s health, was popular with we three women of a certain age. But our favourite was a veg plot that integrated hand-knitted elements for a bit of fun.

The greatest salvo of optimism … a huge counter to the gloom of the Summer Exhibition … was the schools section. Each year children are set a theme and various schools enter displays. This year was bug hotels, and the creativity was both smile-inducing and impressive. You could hear their “architectural” offerings provoking comments across visitors, who inevitably were sharing stories with each other about how much these simple little items improve the whole ecosystem of their gardens. Spending the day with thousands of people who are each making little improvements to help fight climate change left me feeling a good deal more cheerful than I had been a few nights before on Piccadilly.

As usual, we spent most of our time, and money, in the great plant marquee where all the specialist nurseries gather to show off new introductions along with the best of their existing plants. Despite three of us with mature gardens, we each managed some treasures. (In my case, along with the Liberty, two other hostas, three dahlias and a scented geranium, most of which are destined for pots.)

The music programme continues to expand since the Festival re-naming, and in different weather we might have lingered much more at the various stages. Instead we spent a hefty chunk of time in shady areas relaxing with cool drinks. If climate change makes this an average July, they’re going to have to consider shading more of the entertainment spots.

They’ll also need more food options. While much else has changed, the food trucks are still a long way from the dazzling profusion you might find at London hot spots like Borough Market. 

Both are something I suspect will be on planning lists, as the transformation continues. The direction is most obvious in this year’s introduction of a Flowers After Hours party on Friday night, with admission from 4-10, all the floral activities continuing and an uptick in the music. There’s even a silent disco. The fact that the RHS is charging almost £20 more for this event than the just under £39 members pay to go for the whole day says a lot.

The jury is out on whether or not our trio will ever convert to night time attendees and invite the boys along. I rather doubt it. We have our priorities. Whatever the changes, Hampton Court will remain an anchor in our social diaries.