Cotehele House sits on the Cornish side of the beautiful Tamar Valley, a valley separating Devon from Cornwall. The house is hidden down narrow deeply wooded high banked lanes making finding the property difficult. We decided to switch on our Sat Nav - a big mistake, as the terrain proved to be far too confusing for it to cope. Instead of arriving at Cotehele we ended up stuck in the middle of a very remote farmyard!!!
Cotehele House was founded in 1300 but the current architecture is mostly early Tudor dating back to 1485.
In its 62nd year of making, the Cotehele garland has now become a winter legend. All of the flowers are grown at Cotehele using flower seeds sown at the beginning of each year, and then harvested as early as April. Each year around 40,000 flowers are cut and dried, but this year a record number of 45,000 flowers were placed into the garland thanks to our long, hot summer. The Tudor Great Hall decked out with the 60ft long floral garland is a lovely sight to see.
A video of the 2016 garland
This year there is an additional attractive and colourful display by Dominique Coiffait showing 20,000 linocut flowers which he created on paper to form a frieze running all around the lower walls of the Great Hall. Dominique ran a series of workshops where visitors and children helped him to cut out the thousands of flowers. Hidden amongst the flowers, which are all representative of flowers found throughout the year in the Cotehele gardens, are letters, photographs, and postcards sent home by local Cornish men and boys who were away serving in the the war.
'Forget me not'
It would be lovely, should the opportunity arise, to vist Cotehele again and see the gardens during the summer months.
The making and installing of the garland begins in October - the 2018/19 winter garland was made using flowers in shades of red, white, and blue along with small military style ribbon ties to mark the centenary of the end of WWl.
A 9ft jaw bone stands either side of the doorway. It came from a 61ft Fin whale that was washed up on Colona Beach, Bodrugan in Cornwall on the 2nd January 1875.
Victorian print showing the actual whale
It would be lovely, should the opportunity arise, to vist Cotehele again and see the gardens during the summer months.
