Tag: gardening-tips

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.

Some people think that September is the first month of autumn, but I like to tag it onto summer in the hope that we get an ‘Indian Summer’ which is always such a treat.

Sadly September this year failed us in that regard, as it was colder and wetter than usual. But there was still plenty to look at in our garden.

There were plenty of jobs to do too! We decided to revamp Arabella’s Garden, the garden we made for our granddaughter. We began by clearing the areas we had become uncomfortable with. Once clear we improved the soil with compost and set the plants out where we wanted them to go to check the layout looked okay.

The key plant was a bright greenish-yellow grass, a hakonochloa. We added some ajuga with variegated foliage and a muckendenia. The idea was to keep the overall planting height quite low, so other plants would sit among the hakonechloa neatly.

We planted low growing bulbs too, Anemone blanda and Narcissus golden bells.

I ordered from Ebay 10 tiny baby plantlets of Kalanchoe daigremontiana so planted them into cells to get them started.

While moving a succulent in a terracotta pot I noticed this rather handsome moth with beautiful markings, in particular its pale yellow ‘Y’ shape on each wing. Using my Apple mobile phone I found out it’s called a ‘Silver Y’ but on my specimen the ‘Y’ shapes definitely look yellow. The rest of its colours and patterns are in shades of grey with some chocolate brown markings. The ‘Silver Y’ is a migratory moth and is likely to be the commonest of our migrators.

Sadly throughout 2024 our unusual cotoneaster, the yellow berried Cotoneaster rothschildianus has been looking increasingly unhealthy until late summer when it lost all its foliage and looked dead. On close inspection we found this to be the case, so Ian our gardener and I worked together to take it up.

The photo below left shows the place where roots should have been but they are completely missing.

An important task to be done at this time of the year is to thin out the branches of our Malus ‘Butterball’ so Ian set about thinning out badly shaped, crossing branches as well as any dead or diseased ones.

We soon had an audience of very nosey sheep who fancied a nibble of the malus leaves, sometimes pulling branches from us or having a sort of tug of war trying to pull branches through the fence.

The view outwards once the butterball was cleaned up was more open and we could see the hills better than before.

One of the brightest flowering plants in our September garden is this orange, yellow and red Mahonia called Mahonia nitens ‘Cabaret’. It attracts so many pollinators that it buzzes with sounds of bees, wasps and hoverflies.

So that was September in our Avocet garden. Fingers crossed that October is kinder to us and the garden.