I had been wanting to visit Wentworth Woodhouse for several years and have never been able to find the time, anyway earlier this year I purchased some tickets to visit the house and gardens once I realised the RHS had organised a five-day flower festival there. 

It is only one hour’s drive from home to Wentworth Woodhouse, unfortunately today the journey took us twice as long due soley to the sheer volume of traffic heading to the flower show. Today’s five-day event has replaced the usual RHS Tatton Park Flower Show in Cheshire. After finally getting parked we headed the short distance from the car to the house and headed over to the refreshment stall for a coffee. It was a lovely morning, dry, bright, and sunny with the temperature hovering around 20c, very pleasant for walking around a huge flower show. Whilst enjoying our coffee we had a good look at the site map, which came with a very informative guide book to get our bearings. Suitably refreshed we had a look around the trade stands situated at the rear of the house. This was occasionally interrupted whilst we watched the BBC ‘Gardeners World’ team shoot some film sequences for their programme which was being broadcast tomorrow evening (Thursday on BBC2). We eventually headed around the side of the house to the front lawn to have a look at the floral displays in the house. Apparently, there are over three hundred rooms inside Wentworth Woodhouse, though only a handful of state rooms have been opened to the public, the rooms that we visited were beautiful and palatial. The ‘Whistlejacket Room’ (named after the painting of the racehorse Whistlejacket which was hung on the wall) was full of floral displays which were stunning, in another room guest speakers were giving talks and demonstrations on a variety of gardening type subjects to the attentive visiting public, and in another room were fine displays of vegetables and picked fruit, I have never seen such lovely presented displays of picked fruit as I saw this morning.

After a very brief walk around the house, we headed over to the main stage area and followed the route down to the Floral Marquee passing numerous gardening trade stands lining both sides of our route, selling gardening equipment, bulbs, plants, garden furniture, in fact everything you could possibly think of for the garden. The Floral Marquee was huge and very nearly the same length as the width of the main house itself and that is about six hundred feet! I could have quite easily spent the day in here just admiring some of the huge displays of Ferns, Hosta’s, Gladioli, Alliums, Water features as well as smaller displays of Bonsai, Cacti, and Fuchsias.  Heading back outside we had a look at some of the smaller ‘Long Border’ show gardens, the BBC crews were busily filming segments amongst them which was quite fascinating to watch, but the gardens were beautiful and imaginative, it was interesting to see how much planting you could put into a small space but the garden designers had done an amazing job producing some excellent designs. Another coffee stop beckoned so we headed back round to the other side of the house to the refreshment area for a rest. There was a distinct lack of pop-up mobile coffee stalls, but after a queue we enjoyed a very pleasant drink and Dutch pastry. Suitably refreshed we continued our ramble around the show areas, we passed at least six large show gardens but due to the large numbers of visitors in this particular area we soon made our exit to another part of the show, though by now it was mid-afternoon with lots of visitors milling around, so we decided to have a steady walk back to the car and the journey home. Fortunately, the journey home took half the time it took us to get here. That said we had a lovely day and were left full of inspirational ideas to take back to our own garden. Well done RHS and Wentworth Woodhouse, for a very enjoyable day.