Tick.

I'm back in the bosom of my family after ten days of skiving off from family life and all associated domesticity.....my previous record away from my husband and four children was five days, when I went to the Gold Coast......to go to a yoga workshop with Bikram Choudhury. This time I've been on a garden odyssey in the UK.

During my brief foray outside the realms of my everyday reality, I've been busy ticking off gardening related activity from my bucket list.

First and foremost, I'm pleased to report that I drank champagne at 'Highgrove'.....yet you'll just have to take my word for it as cameras were strictly forbidden......and then dropped in to visit Prince Charles' second cousin Ashley Hicks at 'The Grove' where we wandered around the garden, in the rain, while he regaled us with amusing anecdotes about his late father, while his mother was tucked up in the house on the sofa under a blanket, knitting:

Sadly, they didn't invite us in for a restorative G&T.

After a turn around the late Rosemary Verey's old house and garden there was a delicious lunch in the village pub just across the road:

Followed by a cream tea a couple of hours later sitting out amongst the topiary in the garden at West Green House:

Which was utterly gorgeous and theatrical:

Look at the stunning chinoiserie chicken coop:

I finally gazed upon Hidcote gardens with my own eyes, after dedicatedly growing the lavender bearing it's name in my own garden, way back in Hobart, for years:

It was glorious.....even though I may have been called something rude by a not very nice man in the cafe, after a stoush for a vacant table in the sunshine. And there I was thinking that flowers and gardens made people happy.

Great Dixter was beautiful too:

Not only was Christopher Lloyd big on creating tapestry effects with the plants in his garden, inside, he also did tapestry of the needlework variety, making cushions to go with his sofa. You've got to love that in a man....after nursing my own tapestry fetish back in my twenties, I've already introduced my eldest daughter to the joy of tapestry.....maybe I should also try to teach my boys.

Last, but not least, I saw Sissinghurst again:

It has been almost ten years since I was there last, yet I still felt my skin prickle with goosebumps when I peered into Vita's room in the tower....it's the one place where her presence is still tangible.....probably because it isn't overrun with hordes of people, like the garden is.

Almost the first words uttered by my husband, when I arrived at the airport in Montpellier, were that there was no food in the house and that we were expecting friends in for a drink.....although, luckily, there was still some drink. So I hit the ground running and mercifully, after a momentary scare, my French came back after laying idle while I used my English. Phew. After ten days of cream teas and various roasts accompanied by yorkshire pudding, I ordered the foie gras when we wandered down to the Place aux Herbes for dinner:

....because I wasn't quite ready to cook!

Rx