Canford Village English Text

We love looking at houses and gardens and will be featuring lots of them on the site in the future.

We hope to show you some places that are open to the public and some, like these, that we just notice while passing by .

So here is a tiny taste of what's to come. All of these pictures are of a row of cottages in the tiny hamlet of Canford in Dorset.

I believe that this terrace of brick cottages was originally built in the 19th century to house the schoolteachers of a large private school located just around the corner. The school is still in existence but I am not sure who now occupies these homes.

What a charming cottage. The hanging baskets are very pretty. If you look carefully you can see that the occupants have planted lavender on either side of the entrance so that you brush against the plants and release their aroma as you enter the garden. Such a nice idea.

We call these windows 'leaded'. Originally each window consisted of many small pieces of glass held together with strips of lead. In the past it was difficult to make large panes of glass so windows were constructed in this manner. Nowadays you can still see windows like these in older houses or houses that imitate traditional styles of building. They look lovely but probably make the rooms quite dark.

The house number is thirteen. In Britain this is considered an unlucky number and some superstitious people would not consider living in a house with this number. In some blocks of flats and hotels the number is not used at all. Obviously the people who live here are not bothered by this and must indeed feel lucky to live in such an attractive home. In fact lavender is considered a lucky plant, so perhaps that is why they have planted it here.

This little gate with it's charming arch of roses leads into the garden of the last house in the row. The owner of the garden has cleverly trained a beautifully scented climbing rose over the arch. If you look closely you can also just see the flowers of a honeysuckle peeping out from the sides of the arch. The combination of these two scents was just heavenly.

If you are wondering what the little box to the left of the gate is, well, so am I! It's not a bird nesting box so it must be there for newspapers or bottles of milk. It was empty when I visited, so it will have to remain a mystery.

In Britain you can have bottles of milk delivered to your door every morning by your local milkman. At the end of each week the milkman calls for payment. Everybody used to have milk delivered in this way, but nowadays many people just buy their milk from the supermarket with their other shopping and this service is slowly dying out.

I think that this cottage must have more than one door as it would not be very convenient to have to jump over this plant pot every time you wanted to enter the house!

The combination of weathered old bricks, white paint and the flowers looks wonderful together. The colour of the climbing roses match the busy lizzies in the pot perfectly. I always plant some busy lizzies myself each summer as they grow well in shady corners of the garden and flower right through the summer, until the first frosts kill them, often as late as November.

It was a lovely sunny summer morning when I took these photos and the gardens looked at their best. The weather can be very uncertain in Britain. Sometimes the summer is dry and hot but more often there are spells of rain and cool weather. This can be unpleasant if the weather is wet during your summer holidays, but all the rain does benefit the plants. After a period of rain the countryside is wonderfully green and lush.

Here is a close-up of the front door of number thirteen. The owners seem to be in the middle of doing some sort of repair job, with the bits of wood and bricks that have been left on the porch, but I can't see what needs fixing. Perhaps they have gathered these bits and pieces together to make some improvements in the back garden.

The mixture of blues, pinks and purples of the flowers in the pots is a very pretty combination, especially set against the pale gravel of the path. Gravel was a very popular choice for garden paths in Victorian times and is currently enjoying a revival in popularity, as people like the traditional look it creates.

Just down the road from the cottages we have just seen is this lovely example of a traditional thatched cottage. Many British people dream of living in such a pretty cottage with roses climbing the walls. If you visit our Crafts section you can make your own, but unfortunately only as a needlework tea cosy. The real ones are much more difficult to acquire!

This tree stump is not actually in Canford Village. I spotted it in the nearby town of Wimborne. Isn't it pretty?

The tree must have died for some reason and instead of removing the stump the owners have filled the holes with earth and added an attractive mixture of plants.

Although the sign in the picture says 'hospital' the building to which the tree belongs is actually is a Veterinary Hospital for sick animals.

CANFORD VILLAGE

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