10°C
It’s been some time since I have written an article for the newsletter, so it does seem rather appropriate to look back at what has been happening since I last penned a piece. March and April are really transitional months in the garden as the plants within it really start to come to life and grow at pace. During these transitional phases I think it’s natural to look back at the winter just gone and asses the changes, intentional otherwise, at play. We certainly found plenty to keep us occupied through the colder months and all that hard work, I hope, is paying dividends now.
It has been lovely to see how the new planting around the Lychgate and Pergola settled in during its first full year, and particularly how good it looked during the darkest days of December and January. The brilliantly coloured Cornus ‘Midwinter Fire’ was the major proponent here but there were others too such as winter flowering witch hazels and of course a multitude of snowdrops in adjacent areas. Somebody recently told me that if a garden looks good in winter it can’t fail to look good in summer. A good mantra I feel and one we will be working hard to realise in the future.
In February we installed a series of new, curved, green oak benches in the area surrounding the new sculpture we unveiled at last year’s Honey Show. These have been expertly crafted locally by the Wood Yard in Digbeth, and I have to say we are thrilled with the results. Visitors were even sitting on them within half an hour of them being installed!
Another highlight has been the exhibition by Carolyn Blake, “Further Than Memory Can Reach”. Do have a look at it if you haven’t already. Carolyn has produced a series of paintings that really capture the spirit and atmosphere of the garden. Front and centre of Carolyn’s paintings are people, which I think is fantastic as it’s the people that are so often ‘air-brushed’ out of depictions of plants and gardens. I love all the incidental details – a wheelbarrow pushed to one side or somebody stooping to concentrate on which weed to pull – that form such a fundamental part of our daily lives here, now captured forever more in Carolyn’s wonderful paintings. Volunteers and some of our horticultural trainees feature heavily too. These are two of my great passions. Winterbourne has a long tradition of giving people the opportunity to learn and garden here so it’s particularly special for me to see these two aspects celebrated as well.
Sadly, we did lose a couple of trees during the plethora of storms that seemed to sweep through the country at the beginning of the year. First a Prunus padus in the Winter Garden area and secondly a couple of huge leylandii trees on our boundary at the bottom of the Stream Lawn. As ever, when a tree falls, it can completely change the aspect of that area of the garden and the inevitable question that comes to mind is ‘what next?’. Fortunately, both of these trees have fallen in areas that ultimately, we wish to develop further. For a long time, we have had ambitions to sweep a new boardwalk style pathway through the centre of the Stream Lawn, addressing what is currently a dead end. This is some way off happening but now with additional room at the end of the garden where the leylandii have fallen, there is even more scope for developing around the eventual pathway and doing something really exciting. In the short term it has opened up a bit of an unsightly view to the neighbouring school, so we’ll be working hard to screen that with some fast-growing plant material like willow, even if only temporarily.
Likewise, the Winter Garden is a longstanding area slated for future development. We’re aware the access needs to better in this area, particularly in winter, and the scale and complexity of the planting could be so much greater. The Prunus padus that fell here has opened quite a nice space that could serve to host a really deep bed with some big structural, winter planting, or even a small seating area. We don’t have a set time frame for this project yet, but we have started conversations about how we might approach raising the funds to make it all happen.
Of course, we also installed our now-famous kokedama display in the Nut-Walk in January and February. I won’t dwell on that here because you can already read lots about that on our blog, and see photos and videos of its evolution on our Instagram and Facebook. I will however, I hope at least, whet your appetite for next year and tell you that we are already planning our next installation. We don’t like to make things too easy for ourselves so, as popular as the snowdrops were, we’re now thinking of using some different plants, in different colours, perhaps at a slightly different time of year. Watch this space!
I’m sure much more has happened besides, but these are the highlights that stick out to me. It all seems like a distant memory now with cheery yellow daffodils bobbing their heads in the breeze and hundreds, if not thousands, of plants growing in our nursery glasshouses ready to be planted out all over the garden for our summer displays. A distant memory perhaps but no less important. Preparation is everything in gardening so it pays have a little look back every now and then and be grateful that you managed to remember to do all of those things in the garden that you can benefit from now that the days are longer – and hopefully warmer – and everything is coming to life.
Dan Cartwright
Head Gardener
