Good morning, and we are in the Four Seasons Garden. I'm standing just outside an enormous beehive, which, for any of our listeners who went to Chelsea a few years ago, would remember our bee garden. This was the center point, and we had it as a little mini museum, a mini beesantium in the Royal Hospital grounds for the RHS Chelsea Flower Show. And we've repurposed it as a cafe looking out across the Four Seasons Garden, and right in front of it, we have an amazing prairie display which was planted up, designed by and planted up by our Four Seasons garden team, led by Ed Edge. And Ola was the one who picked the plants. We have swaying grasses, steeper tenuissima. Um, there are helianthus, there are yellow Achillas, there are Nepitas, and so we've got a really good mix of purples, blues, and those rusty reds. And standing proud above those on crooked branches are some remarkable looking bird boxes, and I've got it on good authority. In fact, I've just seen um uh uh one of the tits come out of it now that these little bird boxes that we put in last winter are being used by the songbirds around here, and almost as a sort of centre point, we have what's called a rocket hive, which is a beehive designed for wild bees, and it stands proud rather uh rather a good statement in that first bed. We're gonna take a walk around the Four Seasons Garden on this blustery but warm July day and see what we encounter. Come along with me. So, walking from the farmyard, as in our other hotel here at the Newt that we call the farmyard, walking from the farmyard end through one of the main entrance corridors here for the Four Seasons Garden, we have Gowra that is nodding gently and delicately in this quite strong breeze, like little fairies flying just above the low-level planting of the old iris leaves and the violets, and in amongst the gourra are these enormous, unapologetically flouncy, big white lilies. They are quite a statement in here. Now, lilies can divide opinion. You either love them or you think they're too gaudy, but I think they are just such an amazing statement, and it's lovely to have this at in the sort of mid to late summer period of new blooms coming through. A lot of that late spring, early summer flowering has been pollinated by all of the bees and the hoverflies and other pollinators here, and so it's good to have something fresh and showy and colourful coming out of the beds now, waiting to be pollinated. And of course, really valuable to have that succession planting going on in the beds because you don't just want to be able to feed the pollinators and the bees early on in the year, you want to consider putting in a planting plan that's going to provide forage for everything from the pollinators to then the other organisms that live off those pollinators. Think about the birds that feed upon those flies, the hoverflies, and all the other things. So it's all about what we consider a trophic cascade here at the Newt, where we want to provide as long a period of abundance and plenty for all the organisms living here. I've walked into the summer garden. The Four Seasons Garden does have designated areas for each season. This is really a celebration of roses. Some of these varieties have been flowering since May. We've got new blooms coming in now. Many of these roses were sourced from David Austen, and bordering the roses are Hidcut Lavender. Hidcut lavender is an excellent lavender. Soon we'll be into August, and really, by the end, traditionally, by the end of August, is when we would be cutting the old flower heads back on these head curts. This year's been pretty changeable. We've seen things like the laburnum a full month earlier than we'd expected. So we'll keep an eye on the lavenders, and when they've finished flowering, when they've gone over to making seed, that's when we'll come in, chop them back to their leaves, and that helps to keep them compact. If you leave them and don't chop them back, next year you'll find there's a lot of woodiness in the centre of the plant, and they'll start to get quite leggy. The centre point for the summer garden is this bronze statue which towers actually above us. It's about 10 to 12 feet tall, and standing above us with a pipe, a pan pipe it looks like in his hand, and looking out across towards the spring garden is Peter Pan, and below him all manner of different looks like fairies, but also I should imagine Wendy and the children. And also there are rabbits, there are songbirds, there are little mice, there are oh, there's even a newt down in here, and what looks like a toad or a frog. This bronze, which sits in the centre of the water feature in the summer garden, is is one of the original Sir George Frampton bronzes of Peter Pan. One of the most famous ones is actually in Kensington Gardens in Hyde Park. Let's take a walk following this lovely rill of flowing water, and we're going to take a walk through into spring. So just as we enter the spring garden now, we have a really lovely plant. But I prefer its other common name, which is Queen Anne's Lace. And those of you who know the wild carrot, Queen Anne's Lace, will know it as being in an umble form, flower, very delicate umbles of flowers all clustered together, and the thing that really separates it and sets it apart is this little cluster of red flowers right in the centre, the drop of Queen Anne's blood. So why is there a drop of blood on Queen Anne's lace? Well, this follows a tragic story of apparently Queen Anne um having 17 children and having lost 17 children. And she used to she used to sew her lace in order to, I suppose, find the mindfulness to overcome this loss. And the drop of blood there is the drop of blood, the tragedy, the sense of loss that remains on the lace, staining the lace. Anyway, this is a beautiful wild flower and a real marker of this time of year. Walking into the spring garden, the first thing that really hits you, I guess, is this sort of openness. It's a very open garden. It's square formed with beautiful Tom Trouton dry stone walls around. There is a circular water feature, very shallow in the centre, and it has four rills coming off it. Any of you listening who are into garden history, landscape, the history of landscape design will be familiar with the influence that ancient Islamic gardens have had on the gardens in the west. Well, this is a classic example of that. Ancient Islamic gardens begin with a water feature in the centre. The water symbolizes life and then it is cut into four by four rills that run from that. This is what we have here in the spring garden. The symbolism of the water that we have borrowed from these ancient Islamic designs, with cutting it into four, is really because this is the spring garden. After a long winter of dormancy, we are now springing forth with life, and this is why the spring garden is set out like this. We've walked into the winter garden now, and the rill meets a well where the water plunges down into the well. This is symbolic of almost a parabolic curve of how life and the liminal nature of the seasons works. From spring and summer, energies are lifted up and then they reach their apex in the summer and begin to slowly come down at the other end of the curve, ultimately ending up in winter at the bottom of it. This is not something to be resented. This is the full cycle of things. Winter is just as important as the other uplifting sunny seasons. In fact, it is essential in order for the life to be lifted up in spring and summer, as well as coming down in autumn and winter. Here's the sound. In fact, it is one of formality and of very human-centric proportions and designs. The commanding feature here is the toporized U. So arches, pillars, curious birds carved out of this living U structure, but there is a sense of frozen in time nature to this. From the white gravel that I'm standing on, which is representing forever snow. Think of Narnia. And then as I walk through the replicated arches, it gives this sense of permanence and not really not growing, just frozen in time. Then we've got these very curious purple beech hedges which again give a good contrast of this dark to the white gravel under our feet. It's a particularly good spot for playing hide and seek in. It's quite trippy. It's a little bit like Alice in Wonderland. You don't really need to have a mushroom in order to feel that you've slipped into a different dimension here. Well, I've now exited the winter garden and I'm into the other corridor, entrance corridor to the Four Seasons Garden, and I'm walking underneath a magnificent arch well tunnel of wisteria, which flowered really well earlier on this year, and I've seen actually there's a couple of flower buds coming back out again. So this wisteria is a hard-working wisteria, it's doing a good job, and on the beds on either side of me, they are fulsome. Again, the lilies taking a commanding role here. I'm going to step off into the arboretum, into the autumn garden. I've just stepped into what we call the secret garden, and I've sort of lowered my voice because it feels like I should in here. You step through this beautiful ornate wooden door into a circular horn beam-hedged surround, and in the centre is a round lead planter about a foot and a half, two feet high. So I'm going to come back here in about a week's time, and I'm expecting to see this explosion of yellow exuberance coming out of this secret garden. It's a charming place, this. Not another human soul to be seen. And um that's rather nice to escape from every now and then.