across the pond

For all the traveling overseas that I’ve done through the years, and all concerts and venues we’ve played in Ireland, Scotland, France and even Norway and Sweden, we’ve never really spent any time at all in England.

So last summer when our dear friend Ginger from McMurray Hatchery in Iowa (where we get our baby chicks from), asked if we’d like to join them on a homesteading/gardening tour of England in June 2025, we jumped at the chance and put it on our calendar.

Fortunately, right around the same time, Rebecca signed Indiana up for a homeschool coop Geography class on Fridays, so as week by week Indy and a half-dozen or so other kiddos learned all about the different continents and many of the different countries of the world, we began planning for our family homeschool field trip to actually go and visit some of things Indy was reading and learning about.

When the date finally got here, the timing of it turned out especially challenging for us, because we had to leave just a day or two after our yearly Homestead Festival, and though we were worn out and the farm fields were a mess from all the rain we had during the festival, we packed our bags and boarded our flight in Nashville and began what became an incredible trip across the pond that we will never forget.

We spent the first few days based out of a hotel in Guildford, England and as part of a larger group from the U.S, traveled by bus to see many of the big tourist sights in the area, along with learning a lot of history of those areas.

The next day we visited the Royal Horticultural Gardens in Wisley…

And we toured Windsor Castle (Indy loved the changing of the guards)…

And we got to spent a day in London visiting  Westminster Abbey,Big Ben, and even got to see a parade just outside Buckingham Palace…

Then as we moved to the Bristol area and continued exploring outside of London, we took a tour of Hampton Court, Henry the VIII’s castle and gardens on the River Thames…

But our favorite parts of the trip were spending a morning in the backyard of a well-known English small-scale homesteader named Sara Ward and her little backyard homestead in London called Hen Corner.  It was there that we got to have our first English tea and biscuits with clotted cream.

She was a fireball of a character, and in her very small backyard space, she was managing to keep a beautiful garden and a handful of chickens and a couple of hives of bees.

A day or two later we spent an afternoon with Paul and Helen, a sweet couple that seemed straight of a children’s book who owned BlackShed Flowers, and grew and sold some of the most beautiful flowers and bouquets that any of us had ever seen.

Before we left out for another stop, the owner Paul asked if he could show Indy how to make paper monsters, and she just loved him and their time together.

And though we continued to see other amazing, hard-to-wrap-your-head-around places like Stonehenge…

Probably our most favorite time there of all was getting to spend a day with the legendary ‘no dig’ gardener Charles Dowding. To be truthful, he is what sealed the deal for us to join in on the trip abroad. When Ginger asked Rebecca and I if we wanted to have lunch with Charles Dowding in the backyard of his “Homeacres” garden at his house next June…, that was it for us. 

We have 3 or 4 of his books on ‘no dig’ gardening (Indy even has her own ‘no dig’ children’s gardening book), and so to get to spend the day with him there showing us all around the dozens of beds in his garden and explaining exactly what, why and how he does what he does…was an incredible gift to us and to all the folks we were traveling with.

And just when the day and the trip couldn’t have gotten any better, Charles invited us all to walk to the local pub with him there is the small village where he lives and have dinner with him and some of the local folks.

And again, he took the time to spend some special time with indy all throughout the day. She especially loved playing foosball with him right before we boarded the bus heading back to the hotel…

Although it was about 10 days total, we had plans to travel on to visit friends in the Netherlands, Germany and Austria. But with all the traveling there and back and the bus trips all around English countryside, we were exhausted when we made our way back to the hotel the last night, and changed our plans, and flew back home to Tennessee instead. 

All these months later, our hearts and minds are still filled with all the beauty, history and inspiration that we took in, and we are even more committed and excited to put what we learned into practice back here at home in our garden and in our lives.

— rory

PS: I’ve spent the last couple of months trying to put together a video that could tell the whole story of our trip, but so far, I’ve only got to putting the first few days together.  So, here’s the first part of our England homeschool family trip in June 2025…

** If you’d like to get on the list to be part of one of the upcoming “Gardening & Sustainability” tours to England, you can reserve your spots or find out more info HERE.