Yorkshire - RHS Garden Harlow Carr

Once the house sitters are instructed, the car packed, the vet has done the last check for the dog, we are off! It lifts my spirits to have a smooth journey, traveling on a Sunday and setting out early to avoid the main traffic. Again, we manage to take the earlier ferry, we love to take P&O but set over from Calais to Dover whilst we could have taken the overnight ferry from Zeebrugge to Hull. But the dog makes our priorities for the way of traveling and therefore we chose the later, cooler season. I have longed for visiting Yorkshire since so long, I was all excited.
We arrived after 12 hours of travel close to Harrogate and were happy to still have some daylight to see where we had landed. One entire week of holidays ahead,oh joy!

As the gardens  we wanted to visit are RHS ones, we decided to start in Harrogate's Harlow Carr Monday morning and go straight to buy an annual RHS membership. 

The garden offered wonderful late summer impressions, colours, smells and a matching temperature. Here is a selection of pictures as we walked through, however afterwards we felt as if we had not had enough and went again on Wednesday morning.

The very promising entry

Many volunteers contribute to the maintenance

Great inspiration from the vegetable patch

The fruit trees had wooden labels specially made
	greenhouse inspection ;-)
How well the water reservoir blends in	BIG BIG greenhouse envy here

A real tomato house

plenty of willow is used all over the vegetable patch

More examples to use willow Betty's tea room is everywhere!

a nice break right in the center of the garden

September light at its best

A lovely shady place among the huge trees

cyclamen in nice soft ground

bird boxes 

a squirrel running off, only a grey one

there was a sitting area with plenty of different chimes and EG made a wonderful background sound performance

shelter for wildlife 

in front of the lake were huge piles of sea weed which had been fished out, it had all gone when we came back 

soft autumn colours just starting

borders alongside the stream

huge gunneras where they like it most, half shady and humid

loved the clever way to make use of hazel

back to the vegetable plot

all the delimitations are done in a different way

dahlia abundance

outside after having bought nice things from the shop

One cannot ignore Betty's!

We had a lovely treat and I would have longed to have one of their menu cards. I asked the charming lady who had seated us - who's mum was from Berlin ;-)- said, she was afraid she was not allowed to give us one as there were always so many just taken away and they had to reprint them at high costs.
We sadly had to accept.

Suddenly, big surprise: the wonderful lady comes back with a Betty's bag and whispers to us: as you have asked so kindly, I went to see the Manager and he allowed me to give you this:

The whole selection of menus! J'étais aux anges! 
P.S. I have a collection of famous places' menu cards which started back in 1987 on my last trip with my mother to New Orleans. That was at 'Arnaud's' in the French Quarter and it was even hand signed by the waiter :-).


./. soon to be continued with Fountain's Abbey