greenbenchramblings

For this year’s garden to visit every month of the year we have chosen ‘John’s Garden’ at Ashwood Nursery. The nursery is owned by plantsman John Massey and he opens his own garden for charities every Saturday throughout the year with the exception of January. His chosen charity for 2025 was Horatio’s Gardens and he also opens for one day for the National Garden Scheme.

For our January visit because John’s Garden isn’t open we decided we would show you the gardens within the nursery itself as an introduction. John’s special interests are hellebores, hepaticas, lewisias and cyclamen, which he breeds and of which introduces many cultivars and hybrids of these. The nursery is now famous for its Helleborus Ashwood Garden Hybrids. He has been awarded the RHS VMH award and has won several RHS Gold Medals and even an MBE. He is totally self-taught but is now known as a great plantsman, plant collector, plant breeder, writer and author. He has had many great friends in the plant world such as Percy Picton famous for his Asters, Christopher Lloyd, Princess Sturdza and Carol Klein from Gardeners World TV programme.

After our usual coffee and cake fix we slowly wandered around the display garden within the nursery itself. The one problem visiting here is that the cafe gets very busy.

The gardeners here show how trees and shrubs can be pruned to look at their best.

The borders here are truly mixed with trees, shrubs, grasses, bulbs and perennials.

The garden is designed with wildlife in mind too with nest boxes fixed in trees, a pool and tree trunks left on the ground to rot away for beetles and their larvae and lots of grasses and perennials left standing over the winter. Berries are present too ready to help members of the thrush family gain sustenance on their long migratory flights. Our own blackbirds and thrushes are joined by their cousins from the cold north-eastern countries alongside redwings and fieldfares.

The orange berries below are Viburnum opulus, a close relative of our native red berried version on the left and a crab apple on the right.

It was so good to see signs of spring in the form of snowdrops, narcissus and cyclamen.

A favourite shrub here as in so many gardens in winter is Cornus “Midwinter Fire” which shines out on dull days and sunny ones alike. A much more subtly coloured feature of a winter garden is the appearance of catkins on a contorted purple hazel and its plain green cousin.

Jude and I are not fans of conifers in general and we only grow a few small cloud pruned specimens in our own gardens. That was until we discovered a family of conifers new to us in Ashwoods in the conifer sales area. The family of Podocarpus,are conifers with colourful fine needles which change colours throughout the year. They also grow into great variety of shapes, and here at Ashwood are quite a few different varieties available in different sizes. We also enjoyed seeing some growing in the garden as we explored around its paths.

What a great collection of conifers Ashwood has for sale! We soon had four different Polycarpus plants and a fastigiate Yew. These were soon potted up in large terracotta containers to replace the succulent collection when cold weather made them migrate to the greenhouse. Here we can appreciate their colour changing trickery throughout the winter months.

I shall finish this post about Ashwood Garden Centre gardens with a trio of shots which I have not shared so far. I hope this will be a helpful introduction to the garden we will be featuring each month of the year from February onwards.

A month late publishing this visit to my garden journal, but I have only just realised that I have not published it. It is in fact almost time to share my December post about our garden.

We expect the garden to show many changes during November because it starts off feeling very autumnal but by the end it gets much more wintry. But of course the way in which our climate is changing it is impossible to predict anythingto do with our weather.

On my first page of November notes I began by saying, “It is now November and the days are getting shorter and overall darker. Nevertheless we find time to work in the garden.”

“We finished bubble wrapping the greenhouse, tidied the ‘Winter Garden’ and planted up a small rectangular border by the new shed.”

“The new shed is now finished apart from fitting out the potting shed end and glazing its window. The water butt also needs connecting to the guttering and down pipes. We added dozens of bulbs to some of our borders. A great way of looking forward!”

Over onto the next page I looked at the ‘Shade Garden’ and noted that, “I rarely feature the ‘Shade Garden’ in my journal but it really looks wonderful at this time of year and onwards into winter. Our ferns add so much to this space with so many different foliage shapes and textures. The climbers on the wooden fence, ivies, clematis, honeysuckle and Hydrangea petiolaris remain full of interest.’

The photos below show some of the many plants in the ‘Shade Garden’ and a few shrubs which grow just as the ‘Shade Garden’ melds into the ‘Rill Garden’.

The ‘Shade Garden’ plants continue onto the page opposite. I noted that, “Blue ceramic meconopsis contrast beautifully with the autumnal yellow foliage of the climbing hydrangea. These ceramic meconopsis poppies were made by artist Anna Whitehouse. Clematis look so good at the end of their season and honeysuckle give colour in their berries and flowers.”

We move on now to look at grasses that we grow. “Grasses are one of my favourite plant families and they are such an important element in our November garden. Their foliage take on gentle colours from bone white to oranges and golds. They provide so much colour, form and texture as well as being important to wildlife. They become shelter for insects and invertebrates. Larvae survive the winter by hiding in the base of grasses. Birds also feed off the seed heads in particular goldfinches.”

In the autumn every patch of colour becomes important, so on the next page I wrote, “Everywhere I look in the garden in mid-November I can appreciate little patches of colour mostly from foliage but an occasional flower adds to each scene. Earlier the whole garden featured bright autumn foliage colours, but a recent storm, Storm Claudia roared through our patch removing most leaves which had given us colour. So now we have tree silhouettes with a few scattered leaves.”

The photos on this page were mostly taken in the Rill Garden.

My final page for November considers our garden wildlife. I noted that, “Wildlife goes quiet at this time of year apart from the wintry, watery song of the robins. Now both males and females have their own territories so sing to let others know. We see wrens about a lot now as they move silently from plant to plant in search of insects. Buzzards and red kites are seen regularly, with a group of five kite seen low flying over the fields of the organic farmer as they feed their land. They are joined by gulls which regularly fly overhead now. Bumble Bees and wasps still feed on warmer days, attracted to various different mahonias which are flowering well at this time of year. We are surprised to see caterpillars out and about while we work in the borders. We regularly spot voles and shrews scurrying between cover.”

“As we clear fallen leaves off lawns and off plants in borders we make leaf piles up against our fences and in densely planted borders to provide safe winter hibernation spaces for our hedgehogs”

So that is it for my journal entries for November. But there are a few words to add, “At the end of the month we found a hedgehog’s hibernaculum beneath our log pile close to our front door.”