Month: January 2026

Monthly Visits 2026 John’s Garden at Ashwood Nursery January

Post author By greenbenchramblings
Post date January 31, 2026

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.

Tags flowers, garden, gardening, nature, plants

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A Return Visit to RHS Garden Wisley – Part One

Post author By greenbenchramblings
Post date January 26, 2026

Back in the summer of 2025 we followed a day exploring the gardens at Kew, with a day at RHS Garden Wisley. Two really big gardens in two days!

We have visited Wisley many times in the past but always look forward to going back again. First port of call was breakfast at the Wisley Cafe in the main welcome building. When there, we roughly planned out our day, choosing the places we wanted to see most of all.

Suitably refreshed we set off around the Jellicoe Canal towards the Wisteria arch and the walled garden illustrating the many alternatives to box which really is not suitable for our gardens in the UK. Across the canal I had to photograph some wonderful cloud pruning.

It was amazing how many alternative hedging shrubs the gardeners at Wisley had found as replacement for the ever-suffering box. Berberis in several cultivars were most impressive of them all.

Neither of us are great fans of wisteria but the way Wisley had grown a selection up and over this long pergola was so impressive, in fact impressing almost every visitor passing by. Topiary pieces looked good alongside the arch too. But before arriving at the wisteria feature we encountered an impressive collection of low growing foliage plants including an especially impressive selction of ferns.

From here we climbed steadily up a long, wide grassed path with mixed borders on either side which featured some stunning sculpture and attractive pruning of shrubs. We frequently wandered off the path to explore the planting areas as we made our way to the Wildlife Garden and Wellbeing Garden.

We wandered off into a woodland area before passing through the Wildlife Garden to discover the Wellbeing Garden.

Wood carved fungi and wood piles told us we had arrived at the Wildlife Garden.

The Wellbeing Garden felt such a comfortable place to be with gentle pebble seats and spiral white paving amongst grass.

The Hilltop building gave us a chance to sit and have a snack before we entered the World Food Garden, a cleverly designed circular garden.

That finishes off part one of our visit report from Wisley. Part two will follow soon.

Tags flowers, garden, gardening, gardens-in-summer, nature, plants, RHS, Wisley

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My Garden Journal December

Post author By greenbenchramblings
Post date January 16, 2026
2 Comments on My Garden Journal December

This will be my final posting about my garden journal for 2025 and then, all too soon, we will move into 2026. 2025 has been another difficult year for us gardeners and as we approach the coming year we cannot even guess at what the weather has in store for us.

I began my December garden notes by writing, “December arrived wet and wildly windy and continued that way for the first half of the month, just giving us a few odd days now and again which were a little more pleasant. Pleasant enough for us to get into the garden and work in areas reachable from hard surfaced paths or bark chip paths.”

This first set of photos shows us tackling seasonal tasks.

The second photo foursome shows us renovating our vintage tools.

On the following page I looked at those special plants that give pleasure at this time of year. I wrote, “There are still flowers giving their all to give us colourful bonuses throughout the garden.”

I then shared my photos of some flowering plants performing at this time of year.

Rosemary Campanula

Helleborus Viola Viola Correa

The next block of photos illustrated some of our winter flowering Clematis.

Clematis cirrhosa ‘Lansdowne Gem’

Clematis napaulensis

I next shared another of my ’30 second sketches’, this time of a Fatsia flower which I described as “A really challenging 30 Second Sketch’.

Over onto the next page I considered the importance of foliage that is so important at this time of the year. “Foliage comes to the fore from December onwards until flowering bulbs burst out with colour. I wandered around the garden in search of interesting patterns, structure and colours in foliage.”

On the opposite page I looked at more foliage and in particular the foliage of Hebes. I noted that,“A selection of Hebes illustrate how powerful foliage can be but, of course, they also give colour from their flowers in warmer times. Their flowers tend to be in many different shades of pink, blue, purple and white.”

Six photos display the variety of Hebe foliage.

The next page has on it just a drawing of mine. I used my Derwent Inktense Crayons to draw a pruned piece of one of our cordon apple trees.

The final page for 2025 takes a look inside our greenhouse and I wrote,“The greenhouse becomes so important in December as it performs several roles. A key job for it is keeping our succulent collection safe from the wet and cold outside.”

The group of photos below illustrate how busy the greenhouse looks when full of plants in need of protection.

“We also overwinter our pelargoniums inside. Some are now several years old.”

That is December over and 2025 too, so next time it will be January 2026.

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Bridgemere Show Gardens in December

Post author By greenbenchramblings
Post date January 9, 2026

This will be my final visit to the show gardens at Bridgemere Garden Centre as we have now wandered around once a month from January to December 2025.

We set off on a dull overcast day on a journey marred by slow and very odorous tractors and trailers, going so far and collecting a long queue of angry drivers. When we arrived at Bridgemere we went straight over to the gardens, having decided to photograph evergreens especially conifers which are quietly dominant throughout the gardens.

However the first shrub to catch my eye was a beautifully variegated holly, surely one of the best, Ilex ‘Golden King’. Close by, this conifer with long glaucous needles and loaded with cones was the first conifer we came across, the first of many.

We followed a gravel pathway alongside a border full of evergreen shrubs and trees, both conifers and broadleaved. The two below looked so different under the dull sky, one a gentle pale green and gold the other a silver grey, its needles being more spaced out along each stem. Its next door neighbour is a much denser bush.

The show gardens use trimmed hedges of evergreens and topiaried ones to give strong structure or sometimes as frames for feature plants or other features. We were most impressed by the cloud pruning at the entrance to the Japanese Garden.

At times large runs of conifers are grown together to emphasise their differences in colour, texture and shape. Being all different heights and widths adds so much more interest.

A mixture of coniferous and broadleaved evergreens always look even better. It seems to be the case because the broad leaf shrubs have more surface area of leaves to reflect the sunlight and also that variegated forms have a tendency to have paler coloured foliage.

There are many broad leaf evergreens at Bridgemere some even in flower to give us extra enjoyment. The first set of photos feature these flowering specimens.

Many of the broadleaf evergreens are variegated which gives more interest and attraction for us gardeners. Even rhododendrons have been bred to have interesting foliage such as silver or golden streaks of colour down the main veins of each leathery deep green leaf.

Now these following block of photos show variegated foliage shrubs and the next block shows evergreen shrubs with interesting foliage colours.

We have only looked at trees and shrubs this month so far but there were a few beautifully patterned, arrow shaped leaves around which were from one of my winter favourites, the Arum Lily, Arum italicum. These are native wildflowers here and we often see them in hedgerows where their arrow-shaped leaves look so dramatic. We have a good collection of differently patterned foliage ones at home so we were pleased to see quite a collection at Bridgemere.

So we have reached the end of our monthly visits to the Show Gardens at Bridgemere Garden Centre, where we found plenty of interest each month with many changes as the year moved on from season to season.

Next year we will be making monthly visits to a totally different type of garden.