Author: greenbenchramblings

A retired primary school head teacher, I now spend much of my time gardening in our quarter acre plot in rural Shropshire south of Shrewsbury. I share my garden with Jude my wife a newly retired teacher , eight assorted chickens and a plethora of wildlife. Jude does all the heavy work as I have a damaged spine and right leg. We also garden on an allotment nearby. We are interested in all things related to gardens, green issues and wildlife.

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Chirk Castle in September Part 1

Post author By greenbenchramblings
Post date April 9, 2025
1 Comment on Chirk Castle in September Part 1

As we are in a surprise warm and sunny spell in April I decided to have a look back to a garden visit we made back in September.

The last time we visited this National Trust property was years ago when we visited in February to enjoy the snowdrop walk. So this September visit would inevitably be very different.

This strange looking sign was found on the side of a van.

To get to the gardens and grounds we walked up a gently sloping driveway which took us to the side of the castle so we had to walk around the perimeter of the castle walls to reach the entrance.

Just past the castle entrance we found the turning into the garden itself, with signs of formality and some soft planting like the roses below.

Then long vistas opened up giving signs of the importance of topiarised conifers.

The background sound here was dominated by the voices of the hardworking gardeners with hedge trimmers. Such work takes the gardeners months each year.

From here on the garden was a combination of powerful topiary, calming green lawns and patches of colourful perennials, with roses and shrubs.

We wandered back to the cafe and carpark and after a quick coffee we decided to take a quick look at the kitchen gardens and whilst there we discovered a communal space called the “Quiet Space”. Such an interesting place deserves a post of its own.

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Beach Wandering on Anglesey

Post author By greenbenchramblings
Post date March 26, 2025
2 Comments on Beach Wandering on Anglesey

We decided to have a few days away up in north Wales spending sometime on Anglesey although staying on the mainland on the opposite side of the Straits.

While on the island we always make time to wander on our favourite beach of all time, acres of sand, plenty of shells of all sorts and virtually no other people except a few dog walkers. The only downsides being the difficult access down steep, narrow winding lanes plus the strong winds which are usually cold as well.

The best way to share our walk with you is to put the photos I took in the order taken. You will soon realise that most of the time I was looking down.

I hope you have enjoyed our wanderings along this open expanse of silent sands and sea air.

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Bridgemere Show Gardens – February Visit

Post author By greenbenchramblings
Post date March 17, 2025
2 Comments on Bridgemere Show Gardens – February Visit

Our second visit to the show gardens at Bridgemere Garden Centre looked set to be very different to our January visit. We followed, more or less, the same route as we did in January and once again we were on the look out for signs of winter and perhaps a few signs of spring.

We made a slight deviation from the pathway to look at the impressive brick and stone built Folly.

Returning to our original routeway, we enjoyed the rich sweet scent of Daphnes and low spring plantings. Below the photos show Daphne bholua ‘Spring Beauty’, the blossom of a prunus and the spring flowers of pulmonaria and snowdrops covering the ground below.

Nearby beneath a tree the ground in between its exposed roots was covered by scillas, white with the palest blue hue.

There were two more daphnes nearby for us to enjoy, Daphne bholua ‘Jaqueline Postill’ and Daphne bhuloa ‘Princess Perfume’, which had attracted a ladybird. The sun had brought out quite a few ladybirds.

In the Winter Garden patches of colour were glowing in the sun.

We returned to the circle of lawn beautifully edged by fan-trained apple trees underplanted with spring bulbs such as Narcissus ‘Tete-a-Tete’ and chionodoxa.

From a gateway we had a good view of the nursery where most of the plants sold here and other Blue Diamond garden centre are raised.

As we made our way back to the entrance we wandered around beds on the look out for more winter interest. But there were some signs of spring too, perennials showing fresh leaf shoots, roses shooting new leaves and catkins fluffing up.

I shall conclude with two wider shots taken from the top of a short flight of steps.

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My Garden Journal 2025 February

Post author By greenbenchramblings
Post date March 8, 2025
3 Comments on My Garden Journal 2025 February

I began my February journal by writing,”January always feels so long a month, whereas February is nice and short. Just 28 days!”

Below a set of four photos I wrote, “Winter flowering bulbs and perennials add shots of colour close to ground level. Crocosmia show off their fresh bright green shoots. Our Calamagrostis and other grasses have new shoots too.”

I then looked at the new shoots of our Sedum and shared two photos of new shoots at the base of Sedum spec. ‘Stardust’ and Sedum ‘Mojave Jewels Ruby’.

The third photo in the trio of photos above features the seed head of a large specimen Sedum ‘Autumn Joy’. About this I wrote, “The flower heads of Sedum turn to seed heads in late summer and early autumn. Looking carefully at these seed heads we can see ginger, brown, biscuit, grey, orange and pale blue.”

Over the page we find a double page spread featuring on the lefthand side scented winter flowering shrubs and on the righthand page I looked at more spring bulbs and willow catkins. I noted that, “Scented shrubs are a special feature of our February borders.”

Daphne bhuloa “Jacqueline Postill”

Hamamelis ‘Harry” Sarcococca confusa

Viburnum tinus

“The buds on our Drymis will soon open and reveal little lemon coloured and lemon scented little flowers. Its foliage and stems work together so well and look good all year round.”

Most shrubs that flower in winter are also heavily scented and this is because there are far fewer insects around to be attracted.

On the opposite page I looked at spring bulbs and willow catkins. Concerning spring bulbs, I wrote, “Our spring bulbs are giving us plenty of colour at ground level between shrubs and the emerging bright green leaves of some perennials.”

“A waterfall of cyclamen below the Acer campestre. Snowdrops flowering among ferns.“

“Eranthis hyemalis also known as Winter Aconite with emerging crocosmias.” A mix of our hellebores in our ‘Winter Border’.”

“Three of our Salix (willows) varieties now have catkins.”

Salix daphnoides S.gacilistyla ‘Melanostachys’

Salix gracilistyla ‘Melanostachys’ S.grac. ‘Mount Aso’

Turn over the page and find a watercolour sketch of a part of our garden from September 1997, which I thought may be of interest.

“While sorting out some papers we came across one of my watercolor sketches of the garden , painted in 1997.”

We also found a photo of the front door area from way back, so I tried to photograph the same view as it looks today.

Then Now

On the opposite page I mentioned a few garden jobs that we tackled this month and I wrote “Even though we have a while to go before spring arrives, we take advantage of any good days to get out in the garden or in the glasshouse.”

We have made a start cutting down grasses.

Replacing a rotten tree stake, trying to rid the drive of algae and tying in this year’s blackberry boughs.

Repairing two wren boxes.We have bought more lilies to plant next month.

Over the page I continued looking at some of our gardening tasks and began by writing, “We are enjoying our winter flowering clematis and at the same time we have to prune our Group 3 clematis.”

Cleaning up our dahlia tubers. Dahlia tubers ready to shoot.

Tidying up the succulent collection. Pruning roses on the swags.

The final page for February features yet more flowering spring bulbs. I wrote,“And yet more flowering spring bulbs adding more colour to the borders.”

Leucojum Iris reticulata

Crocus Anemone blanda (above)

Tags flowers, garden, gardening, nature, plants

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Three Great Garden Visits in November -Part 1 – John Ravenscroft’s “Cherry Tree Arboretum”

Post author By greenbenchramblings
Post date March 7, 2025

John Ravenscroft was a TV gardener decades ago and the founder of one of the UK’s largest garden centres, Bridgemere. He developed the centre for years and we used to visit quite frequently always making for the “Rare and Unusual Trees and Shrubs” section first of all.

He sold up to a national string of garden centres and still lives on neighbouring land alongside the garden centre, where he has developed the 56 acre ‘Cherry Tree Arboretum’. The arboretum opens occasionally for the National Garden Scheme and we visited on the day of its last opening for 2024.

We knew we would find some interesting trees and shrubs here when we spotted this cotoneaster with beautiful and unusual coloured berries.

We were here to appreciate unusual plants but also the range of autumn colours in the landscape. We were not disappointed! Even as we walked a few hundred yards of gravel trackway taking us to the more open areas we found such an array of unusual and beautiful plants. Each one stopped us in our tracks for a closer look.

We soon became aware that John is a serious lover of deciduous Euonymus with their colour foliage and unusually structured flowers and fruits.

Jude and I have long been fans of deciduous Euonymus and grow several in our garden, so it was a great surprise to find one here we had never seen before, the pale rather ghostly white, lemon and orange E. hamiltonianum ‘Koi Boy’.

John is also a fan of one group of trees with the common factor being more to do with shape and structure than foliage and fruits, and that is fastigiate cultivars of trees. We grow several at home including Oak, Amelanchier, Crab Apple and Sorbus. All small compared with the specimens at Cherry Tree.

Now for a look at wider views showing the variety of trees and shrubs, foliage colour, shapes of trees and groups of trees and shrubs.

We spent plenty of time searching for labels!

What a remarkable arboretum! So glad to have visited at last.

Tags flowers, garden, gardening, gardens, nature

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Our Week in the North York Moors – Scampston Walled Garden and Parklands

Post author By greenbenchramblings
Post date February 21, 2025

We have visited Scampston Walled Garden once before not long after it was redesigned by Piet Oudolf one of our favourite garden designers who is also recognised as one of the best in Europe if not the world. He is very influential as a designer and we have several of his best in the UK. Our garden has hints of his influence in several areas, especially his use of grasses and hardy perennials.

We have visited Trentham Park which he designed, part of, Pentsthorpe Water Park gardens, The Oudolf Borders at RHS Wisley and the Oudolf Garden at Hauser and Wirth Galleries in Somerset.

In order to enter the main area of the Scampston Walled Garden we had to follow a pathway around three sides of the walled garden a border of interesting shrubs and perennials. Along one section was a wonderful hedge on stilts.

We followed the pathway until we reached the way in where we entered the Serpentine Garden featuring grasses called Molinia ‘Poul Petersen’ which are grown in parallel swathes within neatly mown lawn grass. In the centre four beautiful wooden seats sit below four trees, Phellodendron chinensis surrounded by Salvia verticillata ‘Purple Rain’. Such a simple but brilliant design!

Oudolf created topiary with yew to form square blocks and undulating hedges.

From this quiet space with its sculptural hedges we moved into the Perennial Meadow where the seedheads of perennials were the stars. At its centre is an old dipping pond.

Scampston was as good as we expected and has matured beautifully.

Tags flowers, garden, gardening, gardens, plants

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

Post author By greenbenchramblings
Post date February 10, 2025
2 Comments on 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.

We will visit the show gardens again sometime in February the second of our monthly visits.

Tags flowers, garden, gardening, gardening-tips, plants

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My Garden Journal January 2025

Post author By greenbenchramblings
Post date February 1, 2025

A new month and a new year, January 2025. Let us hope that we gardeners and our gardens are dealt a better hand weatherwise than in 2023 and 2024.

I began this new year by writing, “January, a new month and a new year as well as we move into 2025. We hope this will be a kinder time for our garden and us looking after it.”

Then I considered some of the garden jobs for the month. “We tidied up the roof garden on the wood store” and then “We planted some new hellebores and revamped the planting beneath the stepover apples. Carex ‘Ice Dance’ became too invasive so we removed them and instead planted different carex cultivars to give variety.”

Onto the next double page spread I consider Birches and tree barks. I noted that, “I think Betulas, birches, are possibly the best tree for a smallish garden and so we have several specimens in both our front and back gardens. In winter on a sunny day they come to life. Their bark colour is accentuated and peeling bark turns orange.”

Still on the theme of trees my next page is all about variations of the properties of the bark of some of our trees, the colours, textures and patterns. Concerning this I wrote, “I wandered around our garden, camera in hand, to look at the trunks of our many trees and to compare their textures, colours and patterns. There were many worth photographing.”

Here I share nine of my photographs taken on that day.

The next double pages I looked at cloud pruning on the left page and opposite I showed a couple more garden jobs we completed in January.

“We have long admired cloud pruning of conifers often seen in Japanese gardens. In our garden we have cloud pruned a box hedge.Up until now we have never attempted to work with a conifer. We recently bought a cloud pruned pine, a Pinus nigra ‘Marie Bregeon’ and a Pinus nigra ‘Nana’ to cloud prune ourselves.”

Pinus nigra ‘Marie Bregeon’. Pinus nigra ‘Nana’

Tools of the trade Needle clump

Nearly there! All done!

On the opposite page I wrote that, “After too many days of frozen solid soil, when we passed mid-month the temperature shot up from -5C to +7C. So maybe we can get a fork or trowel in the soil.

We have now completed the planting of a variety of Carex plants beneath the stepover apples.”

“I fixed a solar light in the toolshed.”

Opposite the page about a couple of tasks is a more colourful page about Rose hips. I noted that, “Roses give us colourful blooms for many months starting late May flowering on into December. But roses don’t stop then. Several of ours give colourful hips in shades of red and orange and various shapes and sizes.”

My pencil crayon sketches below show the hips of Rosa ‘Summer Wine’ a climber and Rosa ‘Bobby James’ a rambler. The actual pencil crayons used were Derwent Inktense Crayons.

It is good to finish this month with some cheerful colours. We can now look forward to what February brings!

Tags flowers, garden, gardening, plants, pruning

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Our Week in the North York Moors – The Gardens at Yorkgate

Post author By greenbenchramblings
Post date January 28, 2025
1 Comment on Our Week in the North York Moors – The Gardens at Yorkgate

A garden we have always wanted to visit is Yorkgate on the northern edge of Leeds. Thus on our homeward journey after our week in the North Yorks Moors we took a short detour to allow us the chance to visit. The garden is now maintained by the charity, Perennial which ensures it has a healthy future.

The planting alongside the driveway to the carpark set the scene nicely for us. Naturally our first stop was the cafe where we had coffee and breakfast.

We were handed a simple plan of the garden so after leaving the restaurant we set off to discover what the garden had to offer.

Firstly I will create a small gallery of interesting plants.

The following selection of interesting plants is all about perennials, deserving of a close up look, the only exception is the rose and the miscanthus grass below.

Yorkgate is a garden where you must keep an eye out for longer views giving interest possibly group of plants but equally unusual garden features.

The garden presented us with surprises too, such as the way this shrub was shaped in such an unusual way. Later we found a similarly shaped climbing shrub on the gable end of a building.

A selection of garden cameos which lift a garden above the normal are found here frequently as we explore.

After waiting so long to visit the garden at Yorkgate, it was as good as we had anticipated. There are so many design and plant ideas, that it doesn’t matter how experienced a gardener you are, there is plenty to look at and lots of ideas to take away with you.

Tags flowers, garden, gardening, gardens, plants

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Our Week on the North York Moors – Visiting Villages – Danby

Post author By greenbenchramblings
Post date January 23, 2025

As we crossed the moors driving towards Danby we could see and smell where the heather was being burnt to encourage new green shoots for grouse to eat. I really disapprove of this practice because it must destroy habitat for lots of creatures and the grouse are encouraged so that they can be shot.

After coffee and cakes (fancy brownies) we followed a footpath out towards Danby Castle. We crossed over a river after only walking for five minutes or so and nearby we found a sculpture depicting the river bailiff.

After crossing the river over the wooden bridge we followed the footpath onwards until we met a narrow country lane. On the footpath we found plenty of wildflowers, although mostly now turned to seedheads, and rich hedgerows.

One feature of the North York Moors is the big skies and on the day we walked this path they were blue with small white clouds adding extra beauty to the landscape.

The moors also boast some beautiful single span stone-built bridges with flood river depth signs nearby. This bridge no longer carried traffic which instead had to cross by ford.

The two padlocks locked together to the metal fencing are a traditional symbol of love. They are known as ‘love locks’ and often locked to fences or bridges so this one must be double strength as it is on a fence on a bridge.

We turned back at the bridge and retraced our steps back to the centre. We decided to look for seed-heads and berries and perhaps an odd late flower or two.

We had a surprise, well two actually as we returned to the information centre as we spotted a large dragon created in metal and wood and behind that a circle of leaning posts to encourage visitors to lean back on a post and look upwards.