Exploring the Japanese Gardens at Cliveden!

Hello, thank you for joining me. Today I've come to the National Trust property, Clifden. I'm just standing by the main drive up to the house. Now my plan today is I'm just going to do a video in one set of gardens. There's so many different gardens here that what we'll do is another day I'll come back and I'll do another bit of the estate and another day I'll do another bit. We'll just keep doing it till I've done all of them but I'm not setting any time scale for this. I'm just going to do it as and when. So if you look up that way, that's the main house. I thought we'll do that in a future video. I thought today we'll look at more the water at Clifden, the water gardens and this lovely fountain here. It's called the fountain of love, Italian style fountain. As you can see it's placed around a huge stone shell. I always used to come here a lot as a child and I used to be fascinated by the lady up there, how she's holding a jug with water coming out and how the jug never ever seemed to run out of water. I never used to quite be able to work that one out. So what we'll do, we'll walk around the fountain of love just so you can have a good look. So there really is kind of water coming off in all directions to come around here. You can see the better the jug I said about how the water's just always always coming out and I could never quite understand that as a child. Again there's the house up there, the house is actually now a hotel. I've been on the roof of it once, it's got an amazing view. When will I be able to make a video doing that? I don't know but as I said we'll another day at some point in the future we'll do that in the future. That's got the more Italianate gardens. So again we'll do that in a future video. So we started with one topic on water, we're now going to go to the water gardens and see a lot more water and lakes. That building over there, that is the old head gardener's cottage and these walls here, this is where the kitchen garden would have been once. It's actually now the estate's main car park but what they've done, there's quite a few gardens inside so it's all still quite pleasant. What we'll do, we'll follow where that Mercedes is driving, we'll walk a bit through the car park and through to the water gardens that way. So when you first arrive here by car this is what you see, as you can see it's not particularly exciting as a car park but there are some quite nice garden bits around here. There's a little information kiosk in the middle, I remember when they built that, must have been in the mid-90s. As I said I came here a lot as a child, some quite pleasant little gardens. There's the shop and the plant centre. When I came as a child, what's the shop now? That used to be the toilets and the toilets were over there and they swapped the shop and the toilets over. So just going through the garden centre we are going to head for that door over there and go into the water gardens. There's a good selection of ponds you can buy here, nice green kiosks. So we're going to go through this door, it's also fairly modern, this never used to be here. You can see exactly about the kitchen garden, see how they grew cherries all around the edge, you can just see the cherries, they're not quite ripe just yet. So just gone through out of the former kitchen garden and we're now into the water gardens. Just behind us here there's a maze, that was because as I should have mentioned already, the estate is where the Astors lived. Of course Lady Astor was the first female Member of Parliament. Now here the Astors had a maze and it all kind of got overgrown and in 2011 it was decided to restore the maze. I'm not going to go in it today because it'll be a bit of a, you'll literally just see hedges if I try and find the middle, but I will point out is if you look up over there you can see behind the wall there's a what looks like a tree, it's actually a concrete tree made disguising a chimney. So we'll now go down, go around the water gardens. Let's go this way because most people go that way, so I think we'll go this way, just a little bit different. So you've got lots of different plants in here, some more sort of exotic plants and a lot of the plants were, the idea was that they were plants that would flower during the spring, so that's why you've got a lot of cherry trees and various other plants. If we go down here, down this rocky part, and you may have seen talking of gardens from other countries a while back, we went to Biddulph Grange where we saw some really exciting gardens from different places. There's a peach tree here, that's not particularly exotic, that's quite British actually. Across here this is what's always fascinating me, so you've got the lake with an island in the middle and you've got these stepping stones across to the island. As I always remember as a child there was always some really big fish, big koi carps in here, not quite as big as that wooden one over there, but still quite big. If we go over here, that's the main bulk of the lake there and there. That pagoda is quite interesting, it actually came from Chateau de Bagatelle in Paris and then it was brought here to Cliveden by the Asters. It's got a lovely lake, it's got a bridge, we'll go to that bridge in a minute. What we'll do, we'll walk around there, come back across that bridge and we'll go over that way. So this is the, if you look behind me, that's the pagoda, it's a Japanese-style pagoda that actually came from France. We've got another fountain here, we're going to go back across that set of stepping stones and then we'll go around the estate that way so and then we'll go back, come back onto the island. So there's four ways onto the island, we're going to do all four, on and off the island. It's always been one of my favourite views of any National Trust property, looking across the stepping stones to the pagoda. So we're about where we were a moment ago, that's the main over there. We've got some really, really lovely gardens, a lot of variety of plants, you've got a very attractive Indian bean tree, that tree in front of us, that's called an Indian bean tree. I don't know if it's the right time of year but you do sometimes see the beans that grow on these trees. I can't actually see any, I'm not sure what time they come out but this, yeah here we are look, that is dead now but and the seeds have all come out but that has come off now, that is the beans that grow on the Indian bean trees. We have a look over here, you get another nice view, you won't see the pagoda. A little stream starting just up here, this plant we've got here, this is called butcher's brew, it's, if you see it in woodland it's an indication that the woodland is an ancient woodland. But now I've got over to that bridge, as I said there's a lot of cherry trees here, so they've kind of grown them in, you've got the ones over in the kitchen garden that were grown in a slightly ornamental way but more to provide cherries, yet these have grown to be more ornamental. Get the pagoda and the fountain and everything, I'm just going to go around here and we're going to cross back onto that island. Keep getting different vistas across to the pagoda, so we're now going to cross this rock bridge and take us back onto the island. As a child I used to love coming here, I used to particularly like that bit. I just feel the spray, it's quite refreshing, the wind just blew the water off the fountain towards me, so I felt a bit like it was raining lightly. Now we're going to make the final crossing, it's almost jumping so small. There's loads of them, they smell nice too. So there's the view of the lake, now this is actually an overflow and the water would come off up here. They've got some very big koi carp coming through here, lots of bamboo, now my plan is, as I said, I'm going to come here as and when I can and each visit can be a sort of different theme, so this one we're looking at more the water, but the River Thames is the border of the estate, we're not going to go down there today, it's a bit too far. We've got an oak tree there, another Indian bean tree, what I'm thinking we could do, shall we finish on water? As I said, the water garden has like an overflow, so a stream runs off down there, if we go up to here, there's a gate out of water gardens, water gardens have a deer proof fence all the way around them, so if we go out of that deer proof fence, there's one more set of lakes that we can go and have a look at before we finish this video. So get to here, we've got big deer proof anti-deer gates, through we go, let's close properly, that is known as the long walk, it's about a mile and a quarter, so if you follow it down there, you come down to the estate, we go down here, come to a part of the estate known as the Rushy Valley, which is that valley going off down there, the road you can see, when you come by car or you come probably by any form of transport, unless it's a helicopter, which some people do, some hotel guests do, you come up this road, so we're now kind of going down below the water gardens, the water gardens are up here, the overflow stream flows down here, there's not a lot of water in it and I suppose it eventually makes its way down the Rushy Valley, if you go down there you'll eventually come to the Thames, so as I said, perhaps we'll visit the Thames part of the estate in a future video, so we're now crossing down into the Rushy Valley, as I said it's a lovely place, I've always enjoyed coming here ever since I was a child, I've probably been here more than anywhere else, probably here in Beckham's Cottonwoodle Village are the two places in my life I have been to most, so I've just never actually made a video here because last time I came it was so busy, I just thought now we'll leave it for another time, so we're now coming up to some lakes, now it's interesting because these lakes, a bit like the maze, weren't here, haven't always been here, I think they were once and they've been restored, so they're gradually bringing parts of the estate back that have been long lost for years, they've started to, it's a bit bumpy, they've reopened things which I think is really nice, so here we are, this is the Rushy Valley Lakes, so as I said we started with water and we're finished with lovely calm still water, so I hope you enjoyed this video from National Trust place, the National Trust estate called Clifton, thank you very much for watching, we're going to come back here, we'll do other videos in the future, so I hope you enjoyed it, thanks very much for watching, goodbye.