Nymans at Easter

We visited Nymans garden at the weekend with friends, to soak up some Spring ambience and join in with their Easter trail for the smalls. There's something so lovely about this time of year, even though it's often freezing cold even in the sunshine and you have to pack both a woolly hat and a sunhat in case the weather changes mid-walk. 

Spring flowers are exceptional. Perhaps it's the flower-less-ness of the Winter time that makes these few months so special. After leafy months of the darker evergreens or soggy browns clinging to gnarly branches, walking into a garden covered in pink and white Magnolia flowers the size of dinner plates, or knee high beds of nodding yellow Daffodils, scented Hyacinths and star-like Hellebores is a sigh of relief and a sign of warmer days to come. 

There is some exceptional planting at Nymans, and it is perhaps easier to enjoy in the summer months as a lot of the garden was roped off to allow the grass to grow and work to be carried out without all of us messing up the nice pathways and churning the lawn to mud, but I still like it in April. 

A lot of the Magnolia trees are either starting to turn now, or got a touch wind/frost bitten as there were some crispy brown sections to most of the flowers. Spring flowers are brave, but not always that hardy with an unexpected heavy frost or snowfall. 

My little Easter bunny, mid nibble on a veggie stick by the looks of things! He liked his ears, but was terrible at spotting the items on our Easter hunt - I ended up doing most of the work! Hopefully next year he will be running around and joining in more with the various activities but this year he was just happy to accept his prize of a chocolate egg (not that he needs any, we have a year's supply at least!). 

This bush was glorious, whatever it is. Does anyone know? It was absolutely brimming with teeny white flowers!

A lot of the old house burnt down in 1947 and because of rationing and the restriction of building materials at the time, the family couldn't rebuild it so the rooms that remained were made safe for the family to live in when they came to visit the garden and the rest stayed a romantic ruin. The family who lived here, the Messels, are linked to the British Royal family. The last family member to live at Nymans was Anne, Countess of Rosse and her son was the Earl of Snowdon who married Princess Margaret in 1960. You can see Christmas cards from Queen Elizabeth II on the side in one of the rooms and Anne did actually come back to permanently live at Nymans in 1979. I wonder if it was odd to live in a half ruined house?

It's a lovely building to walk through, there isn't really much left when you consider the size of the ruins but it gives you a sense of what it would have been like, and there is often a volunteer playing a grand piano as you walk in. We were lucky that a chap was tickling the ivories on our visit because Fin loved watching him play and we even had some dancing from our little friends. 

There are various sections of garden you can walk through, like little rooms of scent and colour. There's a big walled garden with vegetables, an orchard, a rose garden, fountains and several dramatic beds which really come into their own in the summer. At the moment there are lots of Camellias throwing their heavy pink flowers at you as you walk past, or vivid Azaleas bursting with colour as well as many other flowers I don't know the name of. 

If you are in the area, this is a beautiful place to wander round and enjoy!