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.
greenbenchramblings 