Bridgemere Show Gardens – our new year’s monthly visits – January 2025

The show gardens at Bridgemere Garden Centre are situated alongside the sales area selling shrubs, and are described in a leaflet as “An award-winning day out for all”. It is now an RHS Partner Garden and is open all year. We decided we would visit monthly and report back as monthly posts in my greenbenchramblings.wordpress,com blog.

The 6 acres here are home to 15 individual gardens with extra planted areas and pathways to give a sense of cohesion. Several of the gardens were first seen at RHS Chelsea and RHS Tatton Park shows and many of those were awarded gold or silver gilt medals.

The first show garden we came across was “The Cottage Garden” which was complete with a little brick built cottage and a typical garden which would be busily worked to provide fruit, vegetables and cut flowers for the owners and their family.

We moved on from there towards the pond, finding many mature trees and shrubs along the way. We also searched for plants of the season.

First siting of the pond was this view below but we could hear the sounds of the waterfall. We love the sound of moving water be it freshwater of rivers and streams or the sound of moving tides at the beach.

This sign of winter reflects the gardeners’ wish to grow plants that are not hardy such as these Tree Ferns (below left). A complete contrast and much more attractive than plants wrapped tight are the red stems of Cornus nearby (below right).

From the pond area we made our way towards the Spring and Winter Garden, passing the “Bandstand Garden” and the “Folly Garden” along the way.

The sign for the Spring and Winter Garden described it as “A garden to savour and lift your spirits with pockets of spring colour and an abundance of fragrance.” This Witch Hazel, Hamamelis vernalis ‘Purpurea’ gave both colour and fragrance.

There were plenty more winter flowering shrubs as well as spring bulbs. But another Witch Hazel first caught my eye with its colours enriched by the winter sun, Hamamelis x intermedia ‘Old Copper|”.

The coloured stems of dogwoods, Cornus add vertical elements of colours mostly reds and greens.

Hellebores are one of the most popular winter flowering plants so we expected to see some in the Winter Garden. The white one was full of flowers but they kept their heads down.

Before we move onwards I will share with you two more flowering shrubs both fragrant but with very different aromas. On the left is Viburnum tinus and on the right Lonicera “Winter Beauty”.

After enjoying The Spring and Winter Garden, we made our way through the Tatton Garden where the structure of neatly trimmed hedges and topiary looked very sharp in the bright winter sun.

We made our way through several more gardens as we made for the exit and all the time we searched for typical winter garden features. I will finish with a gallery of some of them.