Wharf House Gardener

The long-borders are really starting to perform now.  Geraniums have supplemented lupins and polemonium. Delphiniums are just starting and some of the roses are absolutely smothered with buds. See what you think!

Over the winter, we completely overhauled the bed in front of our seating area. It was infested with wild garlic and wild strawberries and the planting was chaotic.  So, we had a completely blank canvas for a new border.

We decided to plant up the bed with plants known for their scent. A bit of reaseach and having chosen a colour theme, we made our plant choices.

We have 3 x Rosa ‘Gertrude Jekyll’; 15 x Geranium ‘Wargrave Pink’; 12 x Aster Sedifolius Nanus; 9 X Suponaria ‘Alba Plena’; 3 obelisks of Sweet Pea ‘Matucana’; 1 x Cistus ‘Brushing Peggy’; 9 x Phlox Maculata Alpha; 22 x Lavender ‘Hidcote’ and lots of Night Scented Stocks as a filler.

It’s early days but the sweet pea scent in the evenings is amazing and Gertrude Jekyll is a stunner!

We’ve been enjoying lovely walks in the garden on these warm evenings. We’ve been particularly struck by how lovely the White Garden is in the gloaming. See what you think.

We both love roses and have planted countless new ones in the seven years we’ve been making this garden.  At the front of the house, in the Canal garden, we have several pink climbing and rambling roses.  Rosa ‘St. Swithun’ is a particular favourite.  Huge, double blooms.  Growing up the front of the house, we have ‘Lady of the Lake’ and ‘The Generous Gardener’.  Both are really starting to perform for us right now.

The ‘Long Borders’ are the first big change we made to the garden, back in the winter of 2013/14. The borders are lined on one side by a copper beech hedge (now about 10 feet high) and on the other by a yew hedge, still only about 6 feet high.

All the plants in these borders have pastel coloured flowers and we have aimed to repeat the same plants throughout the borders.  We have, for example, a Ceanothus ‘Gloire de Versailles’ in each of the four quadrant borders.  Other recurring plants include a deep pink lupin ‘The Pages’, various delphiniums, Rosa ‘Harlow Carr’, Polemonium ‘Lilac Giant’ and different pink and purple geraniums.

We have tried to create view points along two of the axes and have recently had a platform built for a large urn, at the top of the borders. When the hedges surrounding the borders are fully mature, we hope to create a sense of being in a ‘garden room’, with glimpsed views outside it.

We hope you enjoy this short video.

Whilst on our evening stroll around the garden last night, we came across dozens and dozens of bees on the camassia in the White Garden.  It was too lovely not to capture on film, so here it is.  You’ll need the sound up to get the full effect.  It’s also lovely to hear the lambs baa-ing away in the background.  Our dog Bennett, crashes the video at the very end.

Today’s short video tour of the garden is of the White Garden.  When we moved into the house, this part of the garden was just lawn, with a small bed under the sitting room window.  Our hand was forced into making dramatic changes to this part of the garden, when we had to install a new septic tank system.  This involved cutting a gap in the boundary hedge, in order to get a digger in, which then dug an enormous hole in what is now the White Garden.  We were left with an obtrusive series of tank lids, at ground level and a big hole in the hedge!

We decided to make a large rectangular, brick-edged border around the septic tank.  We also dug out another smaller bed along the side of the garden.  The gap in the hedge was turned into an attractive feature when my very talented brother-in-law made us a pair of beautiful gates. This now provides one of the few views out of the garden, onto rolling pasture.

We knew we wanted some height in the White Garden and thought about adding four pleached hornbeam, to surround a small seating area.  The price of mature pleached hornbeam was prohibitive however, so we decided to innovate with four, large, upright pillars, up which we grow a white climbing rose (‘Snow goose’) and white clematis.  The pillars were quickly Christened ‘The Henge’ and it is almost now complete with a levelled hard-surface for that seating area.

The planting in the White Garden is a mixture of perennials propagated here (lupins, geums, ammi, orlaya grandiflora and sweet peas) and some more choice plants we have bought over the years.  The roses are ‘Snow Goose’, ‘Partridge’ (a ground cover rose), ‘Rambling Rector’ (a vigorous climber growing up the cherry tree), ‘Susan Williams Ellis’ and ‘Little white Pet’.  We have Trachelospermum Jasminoides growing up the walls of the house and use Stachys Byzantina and Artemisia ‘Powis Castle’ for their lovely silver-grey foliage.

We hope you enjoy the video.

This was the moment last month when we first switched on the fountain in the large formal pond in the Canal Garden.  Complete with countdown!

The ‘Canal Garden’ is named in honour of the Leominster Canal which used to start at Wharf House.  Wharf House was also the head office of the canal company.  Although now dry, the old canal still attracts a few visitors and there are plenty of signs of its old locks etc.. The large rectangular pond in the Canal Garden is a slight echo of the canal.

The colour scheme in the Canal Garden is pinks to purples.  There are three lovely deep pink lilacs, borders edged in Heuchera ‘Palace Purple’ and the climbing roses ‘The Generous Gardener’ and ‘Lady Of The Lake’.

We think of our working area as the engine house of the garden.  It’s where we do all the messy but necessary jobs.  Over the years, it has evolved and in addition to a paved area for sorting out pots, sowing seeds, pricking out etc., we have a nursery bed for young plants, a cutting bed for cut flowers, a heated greenhouse, a polytunnel, a fruit cage and most importantly of all, our five hens.

Making a nursery bed has probably been our wisest gardening decision of recent years.  We lose far fewer new plants by being able to grow them on.  The cutting bed has probably been the source of the most pleasure however.  From March to October, it is such a joy to have so many cut flowers in the house.

It’s the part of the garden we spend most time in and although it’s not pretty, we thought you might enjoy this short video of it.

A stream runs along the southern edge of our garden.  It actually marks the boundary between the counties of Worcestershire and Shropshire and it feeds the River Rea downstream.  There is a small island in the stream and when we moved into the house, it was little more than a weedy hump.  The stream itself was also in pretty bad shape.  It had silted up badly over the years and was overrun with water forget-me-knot.

We have gradually brought the stream into the condition we wanted.  We raised the water level by building a new weir downstream.  We also had part of the stream dredged.  Then we had to decide what to do with the island.  We considered planting it up but it’s really too small to make much of a garden.  We then thought about having it as a seating area: the views up and down the stream are very pretty.  But how to do it?  Eventually, we saw a small garden at Chelsea, which had a dock, edged in sleepers.  We saw the potential for our island and between Christmas and New Year 2018, with considerable help from family, we began the work.  We repaired the collapsing bridge, edged the island with sleepers and overcame the problem of the ‘hump’ by putting decking over it.  We then planted the edge up with marginal plants.  This is the result.  We really love it.