My Favourite Place: Walmer Castle Gardens
It’s a Cinque Port castle and I first went about five years ago when I moved to the area. I’d not really heard of it before, but people kept raving about it so I thought I’d better take myself along!
The phrase ‘undiscovered gem’ is wildly overused, but there's something for every mood. If I want to be by myself and scuff my feet through the leaves, there’s the woodland garden. But if I’m feeling exuberant, the long borders are the personification of summer, with fantastic flowers and insects buzzing, and kids running up and down the middle.
From the top of the castle walls you get a great view of the top of a tetrapanax in the dry moat and suddenly realise how good they look viewed from above! The spot at the bottom of the long border, where you look back at the castle, is the picture that everybody takes and remembers. But the productive garden is lovely too, and I always go straight to the greenhouses. They change the plant displays regularly so I rush down to see what’s new.
My very favourite bit has to be the glasshouse. All my pet obsessions are in there – a spider plant and lots of interesting pelargoniums, philodendrons and air plants too, which I’m very fond of. If it’s relatively empty, I can spend an hour in there, minutely examining every single plant. But if it’s busy, I have to walk through and pretend to be a normal human!
I've literally taken away part of the garden in the form of cactus ‘Queen of the Night’, Epiphyllum oxypetalum, which I bought when I volunteered at a plant sale there. The mother plant is enormous and flowers at night, and one of the past Lord Wardens of the Cinque Ports used to stay up waiting for it to bloom as it has a fantastic scent.
The beach is just across the road so when you’ve finished you can go and have a picnic looking out to France and go for a swim. It’s virtually empty most of the time and it’s just such a fantastic location.
■ Walmer Castle and Gardens, Kingsdown Road, Walmer, Deal CT14 7LJ, www. english-heritage.org.uk.