Ventimiglia, Italy. Confession: Writing Miss Willmott’s Ghosts during covid meant that everything I knew about Villa Boccanegra at the time came from many, many photos, and long zoom talks with the garden’s keeper Ursula Piacenza and her friend and neighbour Carolyn Hanbury. On Monday I finally got to visit Ellen’s only extant garden and was…
Category: Great gardens
Munstead Wood and Warley Place
Late in 1932, Ellen Willmott got a gut feeling that she needed to visit her old friend Gertrude Jekyll. She was just in time; a few weeks later, Jekyll passed away. We found the order of service to her funeral a couple of weeks ago, which Willmott attended in December with an extremely elderly William…
Peak Perfection: the dramatic reimagination of Chatsworth’s rock garden
The last time I visited the extraordinary rock garden at Chatsworth House, back in -ouch – 2014, my overwhelming impression was ‘yellow’. It was majestic, of course – the sheer amount of – well – rock – is a jaw-dropper, but I couldn’t have named a plant or noted a specific area that came to…
Miss Willmott's Ghosts 