Levens Hall - a favorite place

One of the many advantages of traveling to the Lake District is the proximity to Levens Hall, now of my favorite gardens. What was surprising when I visited was how much I fell in love with the main estate house which dates to the Elizabethan era. But first the garden......

Levens Hall is located in the southeast portion of the Lake District just south of the town of Kendal. This part of the Lake District is flatter and Levens is situated only on the River Kent. One of the first things we learned about Levens is that it sits in a floodplain area and in past years large portion of the car park and surrounding fields were under water. Levens is everything you want an English garden to be. It has a an amazing private garden, it has a nice entrance into the car park, the food is amazing, and the house has a great story that often is overlooked. We arrived around lunch time and to our delight there was a garden tour at 1:30.

The garden tour was a special delight. These are some of the nation's best, and it showed. They focus a lot on sustainability and efficiency. They created a relationship with the local croquet club so that they no longer maintain that highly-ordered space. They also use a great deal of compost, making an already rich soil even better. I was also surprised to learn how they deal with plant replacement. If a plant is removed and replaced in-kind, they remove almost a foot deep of the surrounding soil. They want a new plant to have a fresh start especially when we are talking about hundreds of years of a plant's life.

The garden is about 4 acres but its most prominent area is the topiary garden. This space was designed in 1694 by a Frenchman in the French formal style (also a style we see popularized in a small amount of time in the early 18th century in England). The topiary are amazing and its impossible to really put words to their beauty. Pearl Fryar's garden is a rival, but his context is so different.

Garden lovers often discount the manor house at English gardens. Understandably English gardens are show stoppers but the estate homes can be equally impressive. Levens Hall is no different. Dating back to the Elizabethan times, the house represents several centuries of expansion. Among the many beautiful things I saw inside Levens, the most unique was the Dining Hall wallpaper made of leather. The experience was better than I imagined.