Great Comp Gardens, Herbaceous Border

This appears to be the peak time for herbaceous borders or so I'm told. This one at Great Comp House, near Platt in Kent lived up to the expectation. We were there for an afternoon visit with our good friends Al and Liz and I think it satisfied Liz and Susan as well as Al and me. They could look at the flowers ans plants and admire and discuss their finer points while Al and I could look for photographic opportunities and try out new techniques. So there were many shots I could have chosen from today. I liked the striking colour of the dahlias here which formed a central attraction for the shot. I was experimenting with the square format too.

The visit to Great Comp forms a short punctuation between lunch and dinner. We we fortunate to have our lunch of jacket potatoes with bacon and mushroom filling and salad outside in the sunshine. The evening meal was barbequed chicken kebabs (again) but we ate this indoors.

Although the gardens at Great Comp were interesting, I thought the house itself, which was not open to the public, looked a little odd. One side looked like the mellow brickwork had, at sometime in the past, been whitewashed. This had now been allowed to fade and looked a little shabby. The other side was better but had, what appeared to be, modern extensions with flat roofs. The main roof of the house had dormer windows but velux windows had also beeen inserted. It didn't look quite right to me as I thought it was a 17th C listed building.

A quick trawl of the interweb revealed that the building is indeed a 17th C Grade 2 listed building but was extensively altered at the back in the 19C.