"Welcome to Overbeck's................

.....it is warm and beautiful here. I grow bananas, oranges, and pomegranates out in the garden, and have 3,000 palm trees planted in my woods and garden"

Otto Overbeck writing to a friend in 1933

Perched high on the cliffs above Salcombe in south Devon, and enjoying spectacular coastline views, Overbeck's is a hidden paradise of subtropical plants.

The weather, however, was definitely not subtropical - it was a wet morning, which luckily cleared up as we arrived, but remained dull with barely a peep from the sun through the clouds

"First Flight"

fledglings leave their nest

Banana grove just coming into leaf seen outside through the windows in the Garden Room

Rododendron 'Lady Alice Fitzwilliam' fills the air with a spicey nutmeg fragrance

 These Beschorneria yuccoides - Mexican lilies, look as if they might lurch out and grab you as you pass!!!

Acacia verticillata - Prickly Moses, native to Australia and Tasmania - the normally fluffy lemon flowers drenched in rain

Euphorbia characias wulfenii

Be gentle, and the friendly garden Robins might even feed out of your hand!

Cliff Top Bluebells!

I should have taken my walking boots to tackle the steep, rocky, and often dangerous cliffs that I scrambled up so easily as a youngster!!!
The cliff top bluebells may have escaped my lens, but extravagant displays of primroses caught my attention. They decorated babbling brooks, gave lacey edges to the hedgerows, prettified grassy banks along Devon's narrow lanes, and scattered their pale lemon faces all around the village churchyards. 

We stayed in Soar Mill Cove, accessible only by foot from our hotel or across the clifftops, and by canoe from the sea

Part way up the cliff - it's starting to become very rocky and dangerous -  time to turn round and go back down

past the tangled web of Gorse bush branches 

to safety

In the next post our journey takes us along

Devon's narrow roads, then across a headland 

to visit a subtropical garden