annuals – greenbenchramblings

Our first post lock down NGS Garden in Shropshire – ‘Offcot’

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.

My Garden Journal 2019 – August

Here we are with my journal entries looking at the last month of summer according to the the MetOffice. August has been a bright month with confused weather as has been this year’s norm. plants have continued to grow oversized and then flopped.

I began by writing, “August saw the arrival of some unusual pieces of garden sculpture to our garden, 3 corten steel panels and a bespoke bench made for us by sculptor Nik Burns.”

On the opposite page I continued, We both love Achilleas but sadly they are short-lived here, lasting 3 or 4 years only except for the tallest yellow cultivars ‘Goldplate’ and ‘Cloth of Gold’. All Achilleas partner beautifully with grasses and we love planting them together.”

I continued then by presenting a gallery of photos, where I wrote “An August Gallery”.

Garden wildlife features next, “August has been a great time for insects of all sorts. Butterflies are having their best time for years, seeing prolific numbers of all our garden favourites. Now we don’t grow veg we love the ‘Whites’ “

Over the page from my wildlife paintings, I continued “As usual during August we have plenty to do in the garden. I have now finished cutting the Buxus features. We spent hours tidying up in and around the pond and Jude weeded the two green roofs. We also added trellis to the Blackberry archway.”

Collecting seeds. Taking cuttings.

Weeding the woodstore green roof and thinning the pond reeds.

Freshly trimmed cloud pruned box edging.

So that is my garden journal for August and now I am enjoying our patch in September and we will share that month in our garden in my next post in this series.