If you enjoy pottering around the garden (or someone else’s!), then Great Dixter House & Garden is a must see. I visited this beautiful East Sussex property last year using my 'Historic Houses' Pass. It was a gloriously sunny spring day and the garden was bursting into colour with daffodils, tulips and magnolias.
The house and gardens are well known by horticulturists across the globe, thanks to Christopher Lloyd OBE ~ a renowned gardener and writer, who actually grew up in the house, and helped to turn it into one of the most loved gardens in the UK. The property is now part of the Great Dixter Charitable Trust. Education forms much of the trusts work, which offers lectures, study days and scholarships to inform and educate the next generation of gardeners.
It was Lloyds father who purchased the original property in the early 1900’s and with the help of architect Sir Edwin Lutyens transformed the property into what you see today. Originally much smaller, the property was enlarged by bringing the original15th Century house together with a 16th Century Yeoman's house (dismantled and brought from Beneden in Kent). Lutyens also planned the gardens around the property, creating a series of ‘rooms’ which brought the house and garden together.
In our watercolour painting we will celebrate both the house and garden. We will first look at the structure of the house working mainly onto dry to build up the different values and adding detail. Yo will notice that it is quite a complex structure and consequently, it requires a good initial drawing - so it’s worth taking your time over this part!
The garden, however, requires a less detailed drawing as we will be working directly with our brush to add the shrubs, foliage and flowers, looking closely at their colours and shapes.
We will work onto dry, to build up the colours
from light to dark within each separate shape creating an interlocking pattern of leaves and flowers to create a crisp, vibrant style.
If you are short on time you might like to paint a smaller, cropped section of the garden instead.
To find out a little more about this tutorial, take a look at the short video below.
I hope you enjoy this style of painting ~ although it looks quite a complex subject it is actually built up slowly with small, manageable brush marks so even if you're a beginner you will be able to recreate this beautiful garden.
To discover more about Great Dixter click the link below.
Note: Great Dixter house and gardens are not open all year round ~ although the plant nursery does remain open all year ~ check their website for opening times before you visit!
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