Picton Castle and Gardens – a Plantsman’s Delight

While on our week’s holiday in Pembrokeshire we found this garden on a map and decided to do some research. It sounded well worth a visit. The weather forecast was far from promising – cool, wet and windy – but we were on holiday so decided to ignore it. So with waterproofs on and tough shoes protecting our feet we paid and went straight to the cafe for sustenance – latte for me and cappuccino for Jude, accompanied by a brownie for me and a slice of carrot cake for Jude. Excellent!

We soon discovered that there was so much of interest here that it would provide subject matter for a few posts. But for now this post will be about the garden in general to provide a taster and prepare for more specific posts to follow later.

Just while walking on the few yards from car to coffee, we were attracted by these interesting plants worth stopping at for a close up look.

As we left the cafe replete and ready for a good explore, we noticed that in the courtyard there were wooden trellis tables displaying plants for sale. Best of all were two tables full of succulents several of which were aeoniums, an absolute obsession of mine. After a quick look and vowing to return to indulge ourselves we set off for the jungle garden.

I will come back to the jungle area later and I will publish a post just about it.

Rain suddenly hit us when we were in the middle of studying the jungly plants, so we went along now wet slippery paths to shelter in the glasshouses situated inside the Walled Garden.

Within the walled garden the old walls remained in places and the area was now planted to attract wildlife. The glasshouses were in poor repair but now housed good collections of ferns, tropical plants and succulents.

As we exited the glasshouses we discovered the outdoor spaces there were quite formal with areas of exciting planting ,such as in the prairie garden, clambering into and over the pergolas and around the water features. In the near future I will post a feature on the glasshouses, prairie and other parts of the formal areas.

We left these areas and set off in search of the fern walk, winter gardens and myrtle avenue. Sadly we failed to find these features apart from the winter garden which had been left to become overgrown and sad looking.

We returned to the courtyard by the cafe as we just had time to look at the mower museum and purchase some succulents, especially aeoniums from the sales tables.