Great Dixter | Garden visit, July 2025

Looking back over this year, one of my favourite days from the Summer was visiting Great Dixter Garden, East Sussex, I visited the garden in July when the garden was in full bloom. 

Great Dixter: The colourful Garden 

Colour is a powerful tool, it can strongly impact the way we feel, evoke memories and create a sense of mood or place. Considering colour is one of my favourite things. When planting or looking at paintings, I often find the unconventional colour combinations create the most arresting effect. Experimental colour use draws the eye to a painting and I find the same applies to planting. Painting helps me to consider colour combinations within the garden and vice versa, they work in harmony. 

What is exciting about colour in the garden is the way it continues to change, throughout the day from morning light to evening light as well as stretching over broader planes of time, over months and years. Great Dixter garden is a garden known for its unconventional use of colour. The long border and planted beds ooze colour, vibrant blues, yellows, reds, pinks and oranges grow exuberantly side by side creating a kaleidoscopic impression that is hard to forget. It was the layers of planting where towering yellow verbascum met milder shades of yellow or deep greens where the colours really spoke to me. I can’t think of colour within a garden without thinking of the Dixter planting.