A pioneer Festival of Landscape Painting in the English Landscape.
This is more than an exhibition it is an opportunity to see unique Artists making active and spontaneous responses to Landscape and Nature through observation and abstraction; they achieve their compositions en plein air balancing energy and tenderness.

We invite you to refresh your vision by considering the various Artists different ways of doing and seeing.
and we invite you to compare individual actions and cast a vote for the action and the work.

An event with insights for the Visitors and the Artists
In aid of The Friends of St. Nicholas Church.
Sunday 9th June 2024
In conjunction with Open Gardens, Abbotsbury Village belonging to three historic houses and two commercial gardens,

THE MANOR HOUSE,
THE OLD GATEHOUSE,
ABBEY HOUSE (guest house),
as well as ABBEY FARM FLOWERS a commercial garden
on the slope opposite the lake with a view of the Tithe Barn,

also BEE NICE BLOOMS a long established commercial garden with wide vistas of Landscape, overlooking the village rooftops and the chapel on the hill.

Tickets at the Garden Gates of :
the Manor House and the Old Gatehouse
for Open Gardens (noon – 5pm) – £5
Also tickets for the Evening Reception in Grand Barn
(5pm – 7pm) – £10.
Combined ticket : £15
No tickets required to the Grand Barn Exhibition before 4pm.

< SUNDAY OPEN GARDENS TICKETS can be paid ONLINE >

Four Gardens are in the centre of the village close to our base at the Tithe Barn, in these four Gardens our invited Artists, described in the catalogue, will be at work.

The fifth Garden “Bee Nice Blooms”, off Back Street, follow an entrance through a gate nearly opposite Rosemary Lane is where our “Wild Card” Artists will be working.

Wild Cards, ingenious and committed mostly part time or amateur Artists; they will have a parallel judging process and the two winners of this group will take their work to the Tithe Barn reception to be judged with the invited Artists at five o’clock.

THE MANOR HOUSE

The Manor House is listed Grade II* and sits within the site of the scheduled monument of St. Peter’s Abbey. The house is u shaped consisting of of two connecting wings. The north wing was built late in the 16th century and the south wing in the 17th century. The timing of the connecting section remains a bit of a mystery. It is not a purpose built manor house and basin fact originally two separate detached dwellings; it has been heavily adapted over the centuries and contains lots of interesting and conflicting external architectural features, the stone steps in the courtyard notably coming from Kingston Russell House in the Bridge Valley.

The Garden also has a story to tell, being significantly extended westward into the adjoining field in the early 1980s by the then occupier, The Hon Charlotte Townshend. This new garden area and existing garden was designed and adapted by designer Ian Tay. Mrs Townshend left the house on the death of her mother in 1989 and for the following 24 years the house was rented to various occupiers, the result being that the garden slowly became overgrown and by 2013 was fully derelict.

The current occupier, Mrs Townshend’s son, took over the house in 2014 and has quickly implemented incremental but regular restoration works. The early years being slow, maJustin ny consisted clearances try and restore some of the original design structures. Around 2018 the decisions taken to remove all borders along the full western side and turn it into an arboretum area. Following consultation with designer Justin Spink, major hard and soft landscaping works started in July 2019 to provide a new southern terrace with metal pergola, garden pavilion, and rationalised gravel car parking area. Crucially these works sought to bolt onto a major reorientation of the living arrangement within the house through recommissioning of an old southerly kitchen. All these works were completed in early January 2022.

In the last 3 years, garden designer Daniel Combes has been engaged to help restore or adapt existing borders and specify new specimen shrubs; the focus has been on low maintenance, drought and coastal tolerance plants. you may also notice an unattractive fence – this waserrected around the pond in March 2023 to hopefully divert the resident toddlers away from the water.

THE OLD GATEHOUSE

The Old Gatehouse is a Grade 1* listed building. The tallest part was the 14th century gatehouse to the original Abbey Barn. This was approached from the garden side, the grand archway entrance now blocked by a 16th century addition, but the exit arch into the (then) walled Abbey precinct is visible from the street. Above it are the windows of the chequer, the room where tithes were counted. Further along is the original doorway, now an arched window, to the gatekeepers quarters. The external steps have long gone but a faint trace of them is discernible in the rough stone.

In the17th century a smaller house (village end) was built on, the two being only internally connected fifty years ago. Until the middle of the last century, part of the house was used as a dairy and the building known as the Dairy House. The house has been lived in by the Neuberger family since 1984 when they began to create a garden from the field around the house.