Mrs Pedersens garden and café in Vemb, Denmark, is a two acer garden filled with plants and beautiful still life arrangements set deep in the danish north-western countryside. For those travellers that come a long distance, Mrs Pedersen runs a delightful bed and breakfast in beautifully furnished small cabins and sheds throughout the garden. If you ever have the chance, do take the time to visit as you are bound to be inspired!
The garden is modelled on the English-style country garden with large romantic perennial borders, yet it combines the structure of sweeping borders with very Danish elements of garden design with little still life arrangements throughout the garden, and it is these elements that first greets the visitors upon entering the garden. The Danish have a word for it too: hygge. Hygge means cozy, and although it is a big garden it superbly retains its cozy character throughout the experience.
The closer to the house you are, the more decorated is the garden both with structural elements and with still life compositions. Right next tho the entrance is a white border with lots of details like small stone cherubs and carefully composed plant combinations in pots, but the further away from the house you get the more it loosens up into drifts of plants combining shrubs, perennials and bulbs. In August, there are hundreds of lilies in bloom leaving a heady fragrance lingering in the air.
The garden is divided into several areas, and further away still the garden is more quiet and the emphasis is on larger uniform planting arrangements with views and vistas leading from one area of the garden to the next. Old trees have been incorporated in the plantings, and the emphasis is more on the plants than the decoration. Here swathes of lilies are allowed to fill up entire borders, and you can feel that at other times of the year it will be other plants that take centre stage.
A loop backwards to the staring point, and once again you find an abundance of really gorgeous still lives to contemplate. This part of the garden is fairly shady and has a magical feel to it thanks to the lushness of repeated plantings of ferns and perennials that are chosen for their leaf texture rather than their flowers. I will happily admit that I lingered a long time in this section simply to load up the feeling of blissful inspiration to take with me home to my own garden!
Turn a corner again, and out into the open we go with vast fields around us and big skies overhead. It was autumn by the time I visited, and I loved the way using rusted iron spheres picked up the muted colours of the surrounding countryside. Here there is a well kept pottage-style vegetable patch, where Mrs Pedersen grows much of the cut flowers that are to be found in beautiful flower arrangements in all the little cabins dotted around the outskirt of the garden. "What a jewel of a garden this is!" I think to myself quite happy in the knowledge that my own gardening adventures will never be this perfect.
