On a warm bright autumn in mid-November we took advantage of the covid lockdown rule allowing us out for exercise and booked a slot at Attingham Park our local National Trust property.
We really enjoyed the amazing sense of freedom we felt every minute of our wanderings. It felt great to take a few photos again! Here they are! The last few show some knitted animals placed among a shrubbery for the autumn season.
We visited another NGS garden in Powys as we continued our way through lock down, this time the garden was on the edge of the town of Knighton. Pont Faen was owned and garden by a retired farmer and his wife.
The garden wrapped around the house and had a colourful collection of alstroemeria, several roses, dahlias and many bright coloured patches of rudbeckias.
All these collections of colourful plants were scattered around a garden of lawn and large sweeping borders, which allowed us to see large parts of the garden at the same time.
The gardeners here have a wonderful use of foliage either in clumps of species together such as these hostas or integrated into borders as a foil for the flowering plants.
Another interesting garden visit to help cheer us up while locked down – so enjoyable!
After not being able to visit any gardens during the lockdown period, due to government guidelines, it was great when some lifting of the lockdown rules allowed gardens using a timed pre-booked ticket only system to open. The RHS, NT and our very own NGS (Yellow Book Gardens) all made plans to make this safe.
We opened our own garden along with our next door neighbour on the 2nd and 3rd July, which was great success. But we also started visiting our NGS gardens too.
The first of these was Bachie Uchaf a garden not far away in Powys. It felt great to be out enjoying someone else’s garden. Between the car park on a rough part of the farmyard and the house itself we passed some impressive plant combinations which gave us ideas of what we had to look forward to in the main garden.
The garden is set at the head of a valley so afforded impressive views out into the Welsh countryside.
This was a garden divided up into ‘rooms’ but still afforded us long vistas within its quarry bottom setting.
Bachie Uchaf surprised us with its unusual quarry bottom setting but also by the imaginative planting and use of space availability by the gardeners/owners. One final area that impressed us in particular was a steep rock face planted with succulents mostly sedums. Very unusual and cheerful.
We never expected to find a beautiful garden at the end of a long narrow farm track with grass down its centre, but we did! We were going to visit an NGS garden in the neighbouring county of Powys. The garden in question was ‘Moel-y-Gwelltyn-Ucha, a steeply terraced cottage garden situated at 900 feet above sea level, a truly challenging spot to create a garden.
When we finally arrived at the property we parked close to the five bar gate to the garden and were warmly greeted by the owners/gardeners. Walking alongside the cottage walls the planting against them gave us an idea of what was to come so we couldn’t wait to get started.
This was a garden with a superior borrowed landscape, gently rolling farmland and the sounds of birdsong, lost lambs and old tractors.
The garden itself also had a peaceful atmosphere which made us feel very relaxed. Gravel paths followed the contours of the slope and the terraces and by following each one and exploring around every corner the garden revealed more and more of its secrets.
A large wildlife pond took up a position centre stage. We came across it several times during our exploration and it sat beautifully within the overall design of the garden.
Surprises always add so much to a garden’s character.
Some interesting plants stopped us in our tracks as we moved around the garden, all beautifully healthy and in many cases very well matched to partners.
I shall continue with a few views of the garden from each level.
Two final photos of superb plant combinations.
Back for another delve into my garden journal, this time to see what I had entered during the month of August. Enjoy sharing it with me!
I began by looking at a few of our colourful borders, “August, the traditional summer holiday month, but to us it is more a time to sit back and enjoy our garden”
Below are the four photos featured on this page.
On the opposite page white blooms are featured, “Until a few years ago I did not enjoy white plants in the garden but recently I have developed a liking for them.” The photos show “White blooms with coloured centres.”
Turning over the page are a selection of photos of some of our Hypericum inodorum shrubs, “This month several of our trees and shrubs have finished flowering and their berries are colouring up.”
Two plants feature on the opposite page to the hypericum, a lily and a fritillery, where I shared a photo and an i-Pad sketch.
The next collection of plants to be featured are daylilies or hemerocallis, of which we have over thirty different cultivars. I wrote, “Our collection of Hemerocallis adds so much to our garden, where we have planted them in virtually every border. Each individual flower lasts but one day but more keep coming to replace them. You can eat them too!”
On the page opposite I shared a watercolour painting of the beautiful Lysimachia ‘Firecracker’.
Over the page to the next double page spread we discover photos of agapanthus on the left hand page and a little rodent visitor to our garden on the right. About agapanthus I wrote, “My flowering plant of the month of August is agapanthus. We grow a collection in our gravel garden called the ‘Beth Chatto Border.”
About the rodent I wrote, “Common Shrew live throughout our patch, surviving for just one year they live heir life at speed. We see them as they rush from one border to another, not wishing to be spotted by one of our many birds of prey who frequent our garden, Kestrel, Sparrow Hawk, Owls and Merlin. We welcome shrews as they enjoy slugs and snails as snacks.”
I really enjoyed the challenge of sketching a Common Shrew using watercolour paints and fibre pens.
My journal for August finishes with more pictures of colourful plant combinations and communities we have created in our garden. “Our patch is a very colourful place in mid-summer with each border home to a variety of flowering herbaceous perennials.”
We will see my garden journal again in September.
Earlier this year you may remember that our specimen Cercis siliquastrum got blown over in a series of three gales day after day. We did finally manage to get it back up and tie firmly to its post which we put into a new hole. We then kept our fingers crossed and looked what happened in May! Such a stoic of a tree!
However we feel pressurised by the pandemic at this time the garden reminds us that time moves on, nature continues as normal and the garden thus becomes a powerful presence in our daily lives and our ability to look to the future. Gardens give us some promise of good things to come.
Surely in early summers roses take central stage in many of our gardens. Here are a few of those adding colour and scent to our Avocet patch in early June. I grew up in a garden full of roses as my Dad was a keen gardener and roses were his first love. He grew them in a rose garden that took up the whole of our square front garden, up arches, against the house walls and over arbors with seats below. Our front garden was unlike the rose gardens of the fifties which would normally have a central rectangle of lawn with narrow straight edged borders around the perimeter. Roses were the only plant allowed. My Dad had no lawn just Cotswold stone paths winding their way beneath the roses and beneath the roses he grew lavenders, aquilegias and other delicate annuals and perennials.
We grow our roses in our mixed borders as shrubs or as climbers up posts, swags and obelisks. Here are some we are enjoying now. I wandered with my camera starting from the conservatory doors and followed pathways right the way around the garden front and back.
Rosa ‘Winchester Cathedral’ Rosa ‘Warm Welcome’
Rosa ‘Goldfinch’ Rosa ‘Hot Chocolate’
Rosa ‘Veichenblau’
Rosa mutabilis – variation in flower colour
Rosa ‘Bobby James’ Rosa ‘Wollerton Old Hall’
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Rosa ‘Pauls’ Scarlet Climber’ Rosa ‘Summer Wine’
Rosa ‘Summer Wine’ with Clematis romantika Rosa ‘Red Velvet’
Rosa ‘Bengal Beauty’ Rosa ‘Raspberry Royale’
Rosa ‘Prince’s Trust’
Rosa ‘The Enchantress’
Rosa ‘Lady of Shallot’ Rosa glauca
Rosa ‘Jude the Obscure’ Rosa rugosa
Rosa ‘The Enchantress’ with Berberis ‘Helman’s Pillar’ Rosa ‘Geranium’
And there are so many more to come! Many of those still to come will be David Austin roses bred not far from us here in Shropshire, such as Rosa ‘Shropshire Lad’ a heavily flowering climber with a beautiful scent.
Just as I was ready to publish this latest lockdown post two more David Austin shrub roses came into bloom, R. ‘Fighting Temeraire’ (left) and R. ‘Lark Ascending’ (right).
Slowly but surely over the years we have built up a good collection of Acers, mainly Acer palmatum but we do have a few others too. At this time of year they are coming out of their fresh new spring green foliage so it is a good time to share photos of them with you as we come towards half way through our lock down period.
So the photos below were taken in the final week of April and show a selection of our different cultivars. We do hope you enjoy them as we do!
As promised I am back sharing with you our summer time visit to the gardens at Waterperry.
Through this wooden gate we discovered a formal garden divided into four sections all featuring interesting and unusual alpines. The golden crocus lookalikes are Sternbergia lutea. Since seeing this beautiful patch we ordered a dozen for our own garden.
The orange flowers looking somewhat like Pentstemon pinifolia ‘Wisley Fire’ was in fact Zauschneria californica ‘Dublin’. Again, although we already grow P. ‘Wisley Fire’ we have bought the Zauschneria too and planted it in scree,
Occasionally when exploring gardens we come across seats that really surprise and impress and here at Waterperry we did just that. The first, the ‘Head Gardener’ seat seems to suit me! I want one! Jude obviously equally enjoyed the other.
As well as garden seats we discovered a spherical stone water feature which had the thinnest film of water seeping over its edge and down the sides. Completely different but again rather interesting was this thatched dovecote.
These metal and glass screens looked equally good close-up as they did from a distance. The light altered their colours as we moved around them.
I will finish this report on our return visit to Waterperry Gardens with photos of this beautiful figure sculpture sitting on top of the wall and a stunning piece of cloud pruning.
Waterperry in Oxfordshire is a garden we have visited a few times in the past and enjoyed it every time, so finding the opportunity to drop in while traveling down south we welcomed it.
Set up in 1932 the garden is the home of the School of Horticulture for Ladies run by the stern-looking Beatrix Havergal. Today it is a glorious garden which gave us several hours of enjoyable wandering.
We visited at a time when I was writing a new garden talk titled, “Fabulous Foliage, the unsung hero of our gardens”, so many of my photos focused on the way the gardeners put foliage colours and textures together. The pear orchard was a very peaceful place and looked to promise great crops before too long.
The garden is punctuated with pieces of sculptures varying widely in style, from the beautiful figure in the canal to the rather formal to the beautiful obelisk with words from the Koran on each face.
Probably our favourite part of the garden was the designated ‘quiet place’ which was an enclosed garden exuding calm and peace. The planting softened the formal layout and the beautiful sculptural figure with the lamp pulled us towards it. I was so impressed by the simple but effective plant combinations at her feet.
The most colourful areas in the garden were the trial beds and the long richly planted herbaceous border.
Waterperry Gardens have so much to offer and there is so much we haven’t shared with you in this post, so I will continue in part 2.
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