Trentham Gardens in Spring

We have visited the wonderful Trentham Gardens in Stoke-on-Trent several times already but never in springtime. So last week we took the family along to share it with us. Our son Jamie and girlfriend Sam and our daughter Jo with husband Rob met us in the coffee shop just after the gardens opened. Jude the Undergardener and I took Sheila, Jude’s mother in the car with us. Thus three generations enjoyed the wander around these magnificent gardens.

Come with us and my camera as we wander through the garden, where spring is all about contrasting foliage, texture, colour and shape, with a few special early flowers.

A brilliant design feature at this garden is having a most excellent coffee shop half way round. Should be compulsory! After refreshing ourselves we continued our wander but within a short walk of the coffee shop those of us who are young at heart were delighted to find a sensory walk. A ramble through the woods on a path made up of sections of all sorts of textured materials, bark, gravel, sand, tarmac and best of all a mud pool full of black sticky mud.

In the more formal part of the garden where modern planting overlays Italianate designs, patterns and structures emerge.

Textures leap to the fore as the light reaches its peak in the early afternoon, texture in trunks of trees, building materials and leaf surfaces. In one border Giant Puffball fungi with the texture of polystyrene, erupted from the bark mulch.

Even this early in the year fabulous colour combinations are there to impress.

When visiting gardens we often meet interesting characters and on this visit we met this chap, who had little to say and looked most disturbed about something.