Dirty Dorsington

Today we visited the village of Dorsington, in Warwickshire for their open gardens day as part of the National Gardens Scheme.

There were some stunning gardens there, and I think my favourite was The Old Rectory which has some beautiful roses, and the scent wafted about the lawns in the warm sun.

You may have heard of Felix Dennis, who became famous as the editor of the controversial Oz magazine. Dennis Publishing is now a huge company, publishing many of the magazines that are on UK shelves. Well, he lives in Dorsington, and has a couple of properties and several gardens which are open to the public for this one day in the year, amongst other local gardens, as part of the open day.

One of his gardens is called the Garden of Heroes and Villains and contains the largest private collection of original sculptures in the UK and possibly the world. I believe there are well over 50, ranging from cavemen and a mammoth, to the Beatles, to a beetle, Roger Bannister, and Lawrence of Arabia on a camel. If you'd like to see more have a look here:-
Heroes and Villains Garden

As I said, I think there were probably prettier gardens that we saw today, (and I imagine he has a huge team of gardeners) but I thought you may all have seen photos of flowers before, so here is the very apt (for 2014) sculpture entitled "The Few".

This area was also full of Rolls Royces - I don't know how many, possibly 30 or more.

I think I still preferred the scented roses of The Old Rectory.

Oh yes - why "Dirty Dorsington"?

This is a local folk rhyme dating back to the 16 century, and lists several of the villages in this area:-

Piping Pebworth, Dancing Marston,
Haunted Hillsborough, Hungry Grafton;

Dodging Exhall, Papist Wickford,
Beggarly Broom, Drunken Bidford;

Dirty Dorsington, SoberCleeve,
Lazy Littleton, I believe.


I bet the folk of Dorsington don't like being called "dirty". It's definitely not that type of place!