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.
Opening our own garden along with Vicky, Rosa and Jacob’s next door garden early in July made us one of Shropshire’s first open gardens under the new timed ticket system.
The first Shropshire NGS garden we visited was a little later when we visited Offcot, a garden with a younger gardener/owner than is the norm with NGS gardens.
We arrived at the gate of the garden and were greeted by our friend Ruth, an assistant organiser for the NGS Shropshire. Ruth had assisted at out opening and also sold some of her plants but here at Offcot she was on the gate and serving refreshments too. A warm welcome from Ruth and brightly coloured flowers as we entered the garden both boded well for the visit.
Around the first corner we were stopped dead by this unusual piece of recycled metal sculpture! But from then on it was the planting that we stopped to admire.
We are not fans of annual bedding plants and we don’t like petunias either but we were amazed at the quality of these plants especially those hanging plant collections.
We enjoyed the choice of colours of roses and dahlias, with some unusual shades in evidence.
It always feels good wandering around a garden when longer views catch the eye, especially where borders surround patches of neatly cut grass.
We really enjoyed this visit to a refreshingly good garden and of course the first visit after lockdown to a Shropshire NGS garden.
During lockdown we were also shielding because of my vulnerable status due to a blood condition and COPD so during that time we were unable to meet up with others. Towards the end of that period we were due to celebrate our 50th Wedding Anniversary with friends and family. Sadly this could not happen but we do have a special gift from Jude the Undergardener’s mother, Sheila which has now taken pride of place in one of our sitting areas.
It is a corten steel relief sculpture of a Tree of Life, which looks wonderful against a newly painted brick wall. It features three birds enjoying its branches.
This beautiful silhouette can be seen along a long view down the central path from the .bottom of the garden. Lovely to look at as we walk up the path back towards the house.
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.
Our county town, Shrewsbury, sits neatly and comfortably within a loop of the beautiful River Severn. Our hamlet, Plealey is just six miles south of the town, a very convenient distance for us as we are out in the South Shropshire countryside but a short distance by car to our county town.
As we came out of lock down, we decided to have a day off from gardening and go for a walk along the banks of the Severn, starting at the Welsh Bridge following the loop around to the English Bridge and back into the town centre.
We entered the riverside Victoria Quay passing a plethora of ugly signs and followed the quay with its rather gaudy hanging baskets and planters on the riverside fence. It is from the quay that The Sabrina, a pleasure boat, gives trips down the river for tourists and locals alike. On the left are fashionably popular eateries, including one of our favourites, The Armoury. A very popular riverside public house, The Boathouse sits on the opposite bank just before the first bridge that we pass.
We were surprised to see that the children’s playpark had been updated along a Charles Darwin theme, as Shrewsbury is the town of his birth. Along side the park was a new outdoor cafe with seats overlooking the Severn, so obviously we were tempted by takeaway coffees and cookies. Shrewsbury is famous as the home not just of Darwin but also Sentinel steam lorries and here we found one serving snacks and drinks to walkers passing by. We walked further along the bank-side path enjoying views through the bankside trees and hedges. Some of the willows have been sculpted by pollarding by previous generations who trained them in this way to get long straight whips of willow for basketry, a very important craft at the time.
The final picture in this set shows a lady pulling a canoe on a trailer, who we first spotted on the Welsh Bridge on the same route as us. We couldn’t work out why she was pulling it so far with a beautiful river alongside her. It was obviously hard work as she stopped frequently. It kept us amused!
Signs of an early autumn, golden dried leaves at the bases of the lime trees in the lime avenue, were prevalent As we walked further from the park we found these beautiful apartments in a converted brewery – what a view!
Shrewsbury boasts so many bridges of varied style and age.
The oh so ugly railway bridge!
Our riverside walk was full of surprises, such as a clay tile piece of craftwork created by a local school, a beautiful modern building sat above the ancient town walls, the oh so steep St Mary’s Water Lane and a determined rose bush!
We enjoyed finding this piece of philosophy on a brick wall, before we reached the weir which was our point of walk’s end. Here we turned back and made our way back into the town for a well-earned coffee.
Although we have followed this route many times we still find it of interest!
We grow dozens of succulents especially aeoniums and echeverias. We love them because they give us wonderful variations in foliage, texture, colour, pattern and shape, but they all will throw up a flower spike on occasion. This week we suddenly had a few flowering all at once, so enjoy my photos!
Mid-June in lock down is a good time to admire lilies flowering throughout our borders and even the first flower of Hemerocalis, the Day Lily. Enjoy my photos of some of our lilies.
Coleus were so popular as house plants for years, grown for their amazingly, coloured, patterned and shaped leaves. They used to flower but the blooms were a waste of time and often weakened the plants enough to finish them off.
We are now growing a collection of named varieties in the greenhouse for summer interest. We grew them all from plug plants. The botanists have now changed their name from coleus to solestemon, a much uglier name!
Here is a gallery of our collection for you to enjoy. As usual just click on the first photo and navigate using the arrows.
Continuing our countryside walk from our home village in south Shropshire, we packed up our fruit and coffee and followed the footpath between a hedgerow and arable fields. We were amazed how the fauna was affected by crop ‘overspray’ combined with a spell of dry weather. Right where we had enjoyed our snack ‘overspray’ of weedkiller was destroying the plantlife in the trackway and along the beginning of the headgerow. In places the hedge shrubs were also burnt and yellowed.
We had plenty to enjoy though to take our thoughts away from the effects of modern agriculture. In the hedgerows were heavily scented honeysuckles and wild roses
We rejoined the lane back to Plealey ,after we had traveled the length of the arable field,and on the gateway we found this sign, “Shropshire – love where you live”, which after some of the sad sights we had seen seemed a little ironic. As we neared Plealey we saw this field corner near the lane, an eyesore indeed!
But there was lots to see, heartening views of wildflowers along the roadside.
The strange brown ping pong ball sized features on an oak tree were some of many galls created to feed and protect wasps as they develop from eggs to juvenile wasps ready to bore their way out and take to the air.
Wild rose flowers are always great to admire and there were lots of varied shades from white to a deep pink colour.
Back to my garden journal for 2020 again and we are into the last month of the first half of the year, June, the month that sees the longest day and shortest night.
I began by sharing some of our rose bushes and climbing varieties that we grow throughout our garden in mixed borders and up obelisks and arches. I wrote, “June, the month for roses …………..”
I then featured photos of some of our red roses, writing, “Roses are red!”
Here are the photos of some of our red roses that grace our garden in June.
On the following page I continued with roses but those that were not red! “My flowering plant of the month!
Roses are red? Or white, cream peach, yellow ……..”
After looking at our flowering rose bushes and climbers, I did something completely different. I collect bark that had been detached from one of our birches by recent strong winds and created a collage, which lets us see the variety in colours and textures.
“In June windy days blow detached bark peelings from our birch, Betula albosinensis ‘Septentronalis’. We find what looks and feels like paper all around the garden. Each piece of peeled bark has its own character.”
We can look over the page now for a complete change as I looked at some wildlife found in our garden, a damselfly and a wasp. “Being a wildlife garden, our patch brings us some beautiful visitors for us to enjoy, to listen to and to watch. They help balance the natural world of our garden.”
“Damsel Flies hatch from our wildlife pond by the dozens, beginning with various ‘Azures’ and later the ‘Reds’.”
This beautiful yellow and black Ichneumon Wasp has appeared in our garden in good numbers for the first time ever this month.”
From wildlife we turn to succulents on the opposite page, where I wrote “Our foliage plants of the month of June are Aeoniums, a very special group of succulents. I have built up a good collection now.”
I then shared photos of a selection of some of our aeoniums……..
Next comes clematis, with two pages of pics. I wrote, “Clematis, herbaceous and climbers are flowering throughout the garden. Some are already on their second flush having flowered in the spring.”
The first of the two pages feature flowers from “Pale blue to deep purple.”
The second page showed “Every shade of red.”
The final page for June is all about the bark of Acer rufinerve. I wrote, Plant of the month for bark and stem this month is one of our snake-bark acers, Acer rufinerve also known as the ‘Melon-skin Maple’. These six photos start at the base of the trunk and move upwards.”
So that is my journal entries for June. Next report will be July.
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