Simple Days | Calke Abbey Gardens Derbyshire by Haarkon

Wandering along pathways, snooping around houses and breathing in the fresh air; we love nothing better than to spend a day pottering about, treating our eyes to some nice things.

And so we begin our Simple Days series, by finding people we trust to point you in the direction of some pleasurable mooching.

Our first guests are India and Magnus. They take photographs for a living and also a considerable amount just because they can. Haarkon is a blog of the places they travel to and a photographic journal of what they see along the way, including plants. There are a lot of plants. It is beautiful and inspiring and I urge you to take a look.

Having recently visited Calke Abbey in Derbyshire on their recommendation, we asked India and Magnus if they would mind us sharing their post.

In the true spirit of Haarkon, they offered to jump back in their car and re-visit Calke to take a fresh set of photos and write some words especially for us. They even asked us, which were our favourite bits... well, here they are:

We first visited Calke Abbey in early Spring; the beds in the kitchen garden appeared empty, the trees almost bare and the glasshouses filled only with a cool, crisp air.

A few months on our small island can mean a world of change and we saw that for ourselves here. The green seemed much greener and definitely more full - we found that we had less room to navigate our way around the glasshouses and we ogled at tomatoes on our way. Everywhere was bursting with fruit and vegetables; gourd, pumpkin and fig. Nasturtiums shouted at us across the garden and vines covered the entrance ways - our favourite spot was underneath an apple tree where we stepped into a real-life Attenborough moment as we watched a bird feed it’s young.

The outhouses at Calke Abbey were relatively unchanged for us; that soft light still creeping in through the windows and lying across all the discarded tools, still the remnants of peeling blue paint and still the ferns that make their homes in the mortar.

We found a fuller, more opulent fernery with the green slowly taking charge of the white paint and creeping, dripping, feeling it’s way around pillars and pipes. The feeling of wonder of our first visit is retained the second time around, as with the change of season comes a whole new world for the garden and we enjoyed it equally but in a very different way.

India & Magnus