Spoiler

So here we are on a rickety look-out point above the river running through the gardens. Greg wanted to get a really good look so I held on to him as he leant over the edge - it was pretty precarious!



Ooh, here we are going down to the bright red bridges on the river; it's separated out into various little lakes with a curious oriental yet swampy vibe. Here Greg's marvelling at the palms along the bank - some of them are pretty tall!



Here we are on one of the bridges; I'm keeping Greg from getting too wet on the railing. If he'd had his way, bless him, he'd have been bobbing about with the ducks on the lake...



Back in July, we had some fairly atrocious floods courtesy an unusually dedicated British summer. The ground got so saturated that when high winds followed, the roots of this poor Monterey Cyprus couldn't take it and so it keeled over, having spent a good 120 years snuggled nicely above the pond. Greg was amazed; this tree had lived out its entire life before he was even conceived! When we got back, I showed him some of my older photos; some from when the tree was still up back in 2011, and then some from last September when it had recently fallen and so the gardeners hadn't yet tidied it up, and he really loved them.



We left the river behind - Greg couldn't help but peer down into this tributary stream! We were headed for a new part of the gardens that promised to provide a stunning conclusion to a grand day out!



These gardens sit just on the Jurassic Coast and now there's a charming, daffodil-lined walk up the hillside to this fantastic vantage point. You can get really close to the edge for a marvellous view of the channel, but you also have Lyme Regis to your right and Portland to your right, pictured here as the bumpy thing in the centre of the skyline (it's the original, for all you Americans out there). There's also a castle in the distance, lots and lots of sheep and even a pair of really cool cannons! Unfortunately, this was the first time Greg has ever seen the sea, and the sheer vastness gave him a bit of an existential panic attack. I suppose a tiny potato like him just can't get his spud brain around the magnitudes of scale involved - I maybe shouldn't tell him about space.

Other, non-potato-focussed photos of the gardens are available on request.