Staycation - Gardens and Cars

After dropping Brody off at the vets we drove to Colchester to visit the Beth Chatto gardens. 

The main garden is the water garden, where there are not only plants, but all sorts of wild life.  Above is undoubtedly my best picture of the day.  The gardens are well-kept, we saw a small army of ladies working hard on one of the beds, and pleasing to the eye.  It is also very peaceful before most of the visitors arrive.  Unfortunately, it is also quite small for a garden, and I can't help but feel they could make better use of the space and open more of it.  The Beth Chatto gardens is really a large garden centre with the gardens attached, like a lot of large garden centres it has a huge café, so we had a cup of tea and planned where we would go for lunch.  If the gardens had been bigger, we would have lunched there.
We decided to visit the Wooden Fender, just a few miles away down a twisty Essex country road.  We sat in the garden and had a lovely meal - the food and the service was excellent.  Then we drove back towards Billericay, not knowing quite when we should pick up Brody.  We stopped at the Mini car sales place in Chelmsford, to look at a convertible mini - 4 seats, but only 4 people if the passengers in the rear seats don't have legs below the knees!  Still, it looks like a very nice car and would suit us and Brody, but we would have to find a way of strapping him in.
Back in Billericay, we visited the Ford garage to look at bigger cars - S-max etc.  Then there was an hour or so to wait to retrieve the retriever.
The poor dog is not at all comfortable after his knee clean, even this morning he is clearly in a lot of pain.  We have to go back to the vet tomorrow to see how he is doing, and are hoping to start hydrotherapy later this week.