To be able to visit David and Anneke Blake’s Worton Organic Garden once was pleasure enough, to go along for a second visit with the garden in its Autumn glory was a highly privileged treat.

David and Anneke have created a quite wondrous space in their organic garden on the outskirts of Oxford. I reported previously on it being ‘a lush and rich, seemingly chaotic melee of organically grown fruit trees and bushes, gloriously intermingled with vegetables and herbs, with a few animals thrown in’. In the midst of it all is a small shop and artisan cafe, L’Arte de Mangier Bene – or roughly translated The Art of Eating Well. Just about says it all!

David is the enigmatic gardener, Anneke the cook. David was brought up in Australia, Anneke is from Holland – somehow they manged to meet in a second-hand bookshop in The Hague and fall in love…….eventaully finding their way to Worton in 2005, after being in England three years working as gardeners .

In total there are seven acres of land under cultivation at Worton. It’s a mesmerizing space.  All around you is packed to the limit with an amazing diversity of intermingling and often self seeded vegetables, herbs, fruit, eggs and flowers, which may be grown in Worton but are sourced from around the world.

As the Worton Garden website so rightly says, ‘This is a place to linger in, with friends, with books, or in peace with your thoughts’.

For more on Worton Organic Garden, see the garden website and Facebook page. Worton also features in Unlikely Heroes – my documentary photobook about the current agrarian renaissance in England and Wales.

[Double clicking on any of the images below will open up that image up in a slideshow format. You can then run the slide show using ‘left’ and ‘right’ buttons.  Personally I prefer to go also to full screen having opened the slide show – F11 on my PC, don’t forget to get out of full screen is the same button , not ESC!]