Start of a New Season

Somehow it all ran away with us last year, and I don’t seem to have managed a diary entry since April, when we were just beginning to work on the new garden at Downton. So much has grown and happened and been harvested and evolved during the eight months of our 2022 season, and it is a lovely feeling to look back over the pictures. Here is a selection, covering, we hope: a huge abundance of glorious garden flowers, a scorching hot late summer, the making of many new beds at Downton, and the planting of a rose garden there, a very busy team flourishing and us all learning masses as the year progressed. As we look ahead to the 2023 growing season, we are most excited about seeing the garden grow and develop at Downton; enjoying life in the now established garden at Stokesay, which finally after eleven years of work is pretty much how we would like it to be; the big glorious harvests ahead - frilly fragrant narcissi, ruffled petticoats of hellebores, long tendrilly stems of grandiflora sweet peas, armfulls of peppery lupins, a froth of assorted paniculata hydrangeas, a veritable sweet shop of sugary-looking dahlias, old and unusual varieties of garden chrysanthemums that are now beginning to bulk up for us, dear little jam jars of painted-looking auriculas… and of course the roses, of which we now have more than 150 varieties, and which it makes us drunk just to think about.