We drove past this garden on our way driving down the gentler of the A roads home. This was a Physic garden (a term I don’t really understand), but they supplied me with lots of maps and descriptions. This wasn’t a finely manicured Renaissance or Baroque masterpiece but in its higgledy-piggledy fashion had lots to intrigue and fascinate. The kids stayed in the car (they were deeply ensconced in films/gadgets) and I think it was their loss.

A Physic (‘fizz-ic’) garden is one where all the plants ‘can be used as a medicine or to promote health‘. The Dilston Physic Garden, ‘where magic meets medicine’, runs workshops in all things to promote the use of all things herbal, botanical and medical that their garden has produced. It was creative and unexpected as well as being imaginative and colourful.

Sculptures and mosaics and artworks get you from the Sitooterie to the Opium Den, or the Witches’ Den to the Willow Coppice. If you didn’t find the treatment for anxiety, the Tranquility Pool might provide you some calm. The Herbology House was hosting a seminar when I went past trying to return to the little lavatory shed where the newspaper articles about the garden make you linger a little too long in an essential amenity.

The little shop was a treasure too and I purchased some herbal potions that help with my own ailments rather appropriately! I thought they were seeds but I now know what herbs I need to plant in the garden to make my own teas!