Author: greenbenchramblings

We never tire of visiting the Derbyshire Dales and in particular Dovedale so when we had the chance of a short break we booked a hotel close to Dovedale, the Izaak Walton Hotel. The views from the front of the hotel were stunning.

Luckily we were also close enough to Chatsworth to afford us the opportunity for a day visit. We wanted in particular to explore the areas that have recently been redeveloped. This post shows Paxton’s Rock Garden after its recent redevelopment by the great garden designer Tom Stuart-Smith.

The recent drought conditions were making some plants struggle but most of Tom’s newly planted areas were managing to survive. The first photo shows the strong light and shade near the entrance.

The rock structures were restructured and others added, giving dramatic effects.

In my next post I shall look at Tom’s other new planting at Chatsworth, called Arcadia.

A warm weekend in the middle of July saw us driving towards the Shropshire and Staffordshire border to visit an NGS open garden.

Little did we know how small the garden was. The driveway seemed quite long for an estate house but when we went into the back garden we were quite surprised. We could see the whole garden in one view, just mixed plant borders around a tiny lawn just big enough to accommodate a small bistro set at its centre.

Unperturbed I set about taking some photos to try to find points of interest. Here they are. Coffee and cake stretched our visit to half an hour!

We certainly appreciated the lilies and roses.

The lilies and roses are integrated into the mixed borders around the lawn. In amongst them are lots of perennials and occasional biennials.

A few interesting little touches gave the borders a lift.

So we did enjoy this little garden after all and it goes to show that give a patch a chance and there be more to it than expected.

The last day of July this year was a strange day as our good friend Mark Zennick handed over the reins of his superb collection of Day Lilies to two ladies with a love of these wonderful plants.

The collection usually has between 250 and 300 different hemerocallis and we now have a fair collection at home probably about thirty or so, all bought from Mark at his New Hope Gardens nursery. They are so reliable and easy plants to look after.

To celebrate this last visit to see Mark with his collection I am sharing a gallery of some of our favourites there.

We hope that the new owners of this amazing collection give everyone a chance to visit New Hope and perhaps purchase a few more hemerocallis to grow in their gardens.

As this is our final year opening our garden under the auspices of the NGS, we are reaching important milestones. We have already held our final Open Day and now we have entertained our last group visit to our garden. A wonderfully cheerful WI group of 21 spent a very warm, sunny evening discovering the delights of our garden and the delights of Jude’s cakes.

There was so much laughter and several members of the group commented on how happy the garden made them feel.

One visitor wrote in the Visitors’ Book, “A very interesting fascinating garden” and another “A very enjoyable evening, so much to see and admire, a credit to you both.”

So that really was the end of an era, ten years of opening our garden for NGS Open Days and visits from groups, mostly gardening clubs but also wildlife societies, U3A groups, WIs and many individuals and couples. We did this partly to share our patch but also to raise money for the NGS nursing and health charities.

All of our fundraising events will finish by the end of this year, as we still have six garden talks to present to garden clubs around the Marches and and North Wales during the autumn and early winter.

The last time we visited the gardens at Trentham on the outskirts of the city of Stoke-on-Trent was just after the Covid 19 lockdown period and we were so disappointed. The lack of volunteers to help the employed gardeners seemed to be at the root of it but during that time the whole complex came up for sale.

We recently thought we would return in the hope of seeing enough of an improvement to make the journey worthwhile.

Things had improved but invasive weed problems still persisted with mare’s tail, annual weed grasses and rosebay still spoiling borders.

The best part now is the lakeside walk where meadow planting by Nigel Dunnett is once again providing colour and attracting pollinators.

The area designed by Piet Oudolf is showing signs of its previous glory but you need to look past the weeds which is so disheartening! Here are a few photos.

Similarly the original Italian Garden redesigned and planted by Tom Stuart-Smith is spoilt by so many weeds, but again it is possible to find some joy there.

So we did see some hopeful signs of revival on this visit to Trentham Gardens but sadly still plenty of disappointment. We will return in the future and hope for better things to come.

Here we are back looking at my garden journal, this time we are considering the month of July. The garden has been struggling with lack of rain for weeks now and there is no sign on the horizon. Grass is yellow and brown but we know it will recover with the slightest period of rain.

I began my July report by looking at another selection of our many clematis still performing well, adding colour and height and in some cases scent to the borders as they clamber up and over trees, shrubs, archways and obelisks. I wrote, “Clematis continue to flower profusely throughout the garden as we enter the second half of the year and welcome in July.”

On the opposite page is my pencil crayon sketch of two allium seed heads just after their flowers have dropped, but prior to turning into its late summer colours. I wrote, “Once the shades of purple disappear the allium heads go through a green phase prior to turning biscuit colours, digestive, rich tea and gingers.”

Moving on I considered the flowers that were adding lots of colour, where I wrote, “In July every border seems to have a few star plants giving bright splashes of colour.”

I then shared a gallery of photos of such star plants.

From these bright lush looking plants I changed tack completely and took a look at a bit of up-cycling we achieved. Our metal birdbath had started to leak as it rusted more all the time, so we decided to plant it up with succulents using some of our many cuttings in the greenhouse awaiting homes. I wrote, “We had a variety of jobs to get done in July such as up-cycling our old metal birdbath and finding new homes for our irises which were getting crowded out in our Beth Chatto garden.”

Below are photos of the process of up-cycling the birdbath.

Before looking at he second job mentioned above I used the next page for another sketch, this time of Ribwort Plantain. I noted that, “One of my favourite wild flowers, is ‘Ribwort Plantain’ or ‘Narrow Leaf Plantain’ ” My drawing was created using watercolour pencil crayons and fine fibre pens.

The opposite page shows us sorting out our irises on the Beth Chatto Garden, where we lifted those that had become overcrowded as other plants grew around them and lifted those that needed splitting. We replanted them on an edge of the same garden where the tubers could get the sun and interplanted them with alpine sedum.

I wrote, “Many of our bearded iris failed to flower much this spring thus telling us to divide them and move some to a sunnier spot. Once replanted we added some low-growing sedum between them.”

Over the page I featured another of my sketches this time created in fibre tip pens, and the subject was another native wild flower which we grow in our garden to attract insects, Centaurea nigra. This is a member of the asteraceae family and has several common names such as Lesser Knapweed, Common Knapweed, Hardhead and Black Knapweed.

On the opposite page I looked at our recently acquired house plants and I noted that, “For a long time now we have been tempted by the new wave of houseplants now available. Our track record with houseplants has not been good but recently we were tempted to try out a few.”

I then shared photos of our new plants.

On my last page for July I wrote,”

My journal will return in August!

As mentioned in my last post we managed to explore just 6 of the 16 gardens open on this day. I have already featured our favourite garden of the day and promised to share some photos of the others.

I hope you enjoy my gallery of Pontesbury gardens. Firstly a modern roof garden with amazing views.

A tall villa with a steeply sloping garden.

The next garden we looked at had some interesting idea including a group of white-stemmed birches, possibly Betula utilis ‘Doorenbos’.

The final two gardens we visited were on a newly built housing estate. One had the obvious hallmarks of a space professionally designed and created, so included some interesting elements. On the opposite side of the road a neighbour had created an imaginative garden herself.

And so over the road to the last of my featured gardens.

For the first time since moving to Plealey nineteen years ago we managed to follow the Pontesbury Garden Trail for the first time. Pontesbury is the nearest village to us a few miles away.

The problem was that there were far too many gardens open for the short time available. We had an afternoon to try to visit 16 gardens some a half mile uphill walk away. We managed just six!

We shall look at some of these in my next post but first we want to share our favourite garden by far with you. It was created around what we discovered after talking with the owners/gardeners to be a row of 0ne-up one-down cottages which was now just one dwelling. The garden was a cottage garden full of delights and magical moments.

The husband of the two gardener team was the ideas man and also created sculpture from anything that took his fancy that he could manipulate or carve.

The beauty of sculpture in the garden is that the garden enhances the sculpture and the sculpture in turn enhances the garden. In this garden the planting was thoughtfully put together and long views and vistas helped visitors to enjoy the colourful borders.

This was by far our favourite garden we discovered on the Pontesbury Gardens Open Day so I have given it a post all to itself. In my next post I shall feature a couple of photos of each of the other gardens we managed to visit.

On 24th June we opened our garden for the final time under the auspices of the National Garden Scheme, after ten years of opening. This year also marks the end of the decade of presenting garden talks to garden clubs, Women’s Institutes, Wildlife Groups, U3A’s etc.

During the rest of 2022 we still have half a dozen visits to groups to present my talks and a few visits by garden groups still to visit our garden.

So we held our final NGS Open Day on a bright but not sunny day and all sessions were fully booked plus quite a few extras who turned up on the off-chance we let them in. As we were raising money for health charities we did indeed let them in.

We had spent several days ensuring our quarter acre looked the best it could, dead-heading, pruning, putting in plant supports and planting new plants in the odd blank space etc.

Jude raided her micro-nursery to set up a plant sales table and we put up signs to ensure visitors could find us. An added attraction is our pop-up tea shop where visitors could relish the huge selection of Jude’s wonderful cakes as well as a beverage.

Jude also picked flowers from the garden and created floral displays for all to enjoy as they sat taking taking a break and absorbing the garden atmosphere.

We had a sell out but many other visitors arrived asking to be admitted because it as our last opening and of course we let them in as the day was all about raising money for health charities. We sold lots of plants and a ridiculous amount of cake and beverages! What a success for our final opening!

Back once again with my monthly look at my garden journal, this time for the month of June, a colourful busy month in our garden. I had to begin a new fresh art book having finished off my last with my entries for the month of May.

I decided to feature aquilegias on the cover and the ‘Warm Welcome’ rose for the inside introductory page.

I started my look at our garden in June with a favourite provider of colour and scent this month, roses. I shared photos of just ten. I wrote, “In June roses give us so much colour in every part of the garden, with bonus scent.”

“We love plants that self-seed around our patch and one of the most successful of these ‘volunteers’ is ‘Linaria purpurea’. It has so many variations but also a few cultivars such as ‘Canon Went’, ‘Peachy’ and ‘Dial Park’. Here are just a few.”

Below are photos of twelve of our linarias.

Following on from our self-seeding favourite I featured a more subtle page, a drawing I created using Japanese brush pens, of a small flowering shrub, Brachyglottis ‘Sunshine’.

Over the page I looked at our preparations for our NGS open garden day and the day itself. I noted that, “This month we opened our garden under the auspices of the NGS for the last time, having opened now for ten years. We busied ourselves in preparation and the day itself was a sellout.”

On the opposite page I shared two photos of our “Iris ensata” which has come into its own this year, flowering profusely. In close up the detail is stunningly beautiful. The top photo is a straight print and the bottom one a poster print to show more details especially the lines on each petal.

I finished this June report by sharing eight broad views of colourful patches in the garden, when I noted that, “As June came to an end and with it the first half of the year I wandered around the garden paths taking images of colourful patches.” The next look at my garden journal will be in July, the month that launches the second half of the year.

I will finish off this visit to my garden journal with eight shots of colourful patches of the garden which our recent visitors enjoyed.