The invitation read: Dear Alison, would you like to come and spend a lovely day with lovely people learning about lovely foraging in a lovely garden. Well, maybe not in those exact words, but that is what I understood from it. Did I say yes? You betcha!
I have visited Stockton Bury a couple of times previously so I really needed little encouragement to accept the invitation. Whilst this was a 'press day', I am not under any obligation to write about the visit, but I am not going to keep a garden like this to myself.
One of the reasons for the invite was for us to meet Liz Knight the author of 'Buds and Blossoms', a book about cooking with edible garden plants - ones you might not usually put into the 'ooh I must eat that' category. I will review the book separately in a future post. For now I want to talk about the garden.
Tamsin Westhorpe was our host for the day is, I think it reasonable to say, the public face of the garden but it is owned by her uncle Raymond. Tamsin, Raymond and other family members are the main, small, gardening team, it is very much a family garden sited on a working farm.
There are so many fantastic features like this beautifully pruned fig. It is woven to perfection.
It was a rare sunny day when I visited, and we were all grateful for the respite from the rain. Like many outdoor places the gardens have had to delay opening by a couple of weeks because it was so squelchy underfoot. It is now thankfully able to open.
The tulips under the apple trees were going over a little, but how wonderful they look nonetheless. The green fluffy foliage that is growing around them is Nigella and I can just imagine how stunning that will look in a few weeks time.
I stood in front of the humungous Monkey Puzzle Tree, it has to be the largest I have ever seen and it is very old. Allegedly it might be one of the first grown in this country.
I am sure I found some views I had not noticed previously. I love this rill in the plant sales area.
I nodded hello to the skeps,
and enjoyed the display in the plant theatre.
and as ever I loved the simplicity of this watering can display. This is so easy to do, it does not take up a lot of space, it just needs a few nice old watering cans and some sort of plinth. What I enjoy most about visiting gardens no matter how much bigger they might be than my own, there is always that moment of inspiration where I think 'oh that I could do'.
