5 minute read
GARDENS Goltho Garden near
QUIETLY MAGNIFICENT
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This month we celebrate the work of sisters Debbie Hollingworth and Lesley Burton, plus their dedicated volunteers who all work hard to ensure that the quietly magnificent Goltho Gardens near Wragby looks more and more beautiful each year. September see the opening of the garden for the NGS...
Tea and Romance
A G OOD GARDEN will make you coo with pleasure... but a truly great one will leave you A well as being a wonderful speechless. My visit to Goltho Gardens in early attraction to visit Goltho Gardens July was unusual though. Where there should also has an excellent tea shop, have been crowds circulating, murmuring its 16th century barn for approval to one another in semi-hushed weddings and its two “We worked back towards reverence, there was, instead, complete silence. B&B bedrooms! the house rather than from it, It was midweek, we were still in lockdown and the growing in it had been newly heavens were about to open - I owe my poorly-timed visit to a ploughed and was still very much functionwoefully inaccurate weather forecast. Still that afforded me the ing as agricultural land.” rare pleasure of having the whole 4.5 acre site to myself. house nearly in ruin, in addition to the garden, part of which was the barns first and making our homes more habitable!” as the field that once had crops By the millennium, the overall layout of the Goltho Gardens is quietly magnificent, it’s one of the most garden was established, and finally the old understated but truly beautiful places to visit in the whole of farm pond as cleared ready for a new pond Lincolnshire. And happily, at a time when most NGS garden garden with an adjacent area of decking. openings would have come and gone – or have been cancelled because of Covid-19 – the Wragby garden is still very much worth With the landscape itself taking shape, it was a visit. In fact, on 27th September, it’s very much open to visitors, now time for the family to start to establish one of the few gardens still able to open and support the charity. the planting schemes that visitors can enjoy Owned by Debbie Hollingworth and her sister Lesley Burton, the and species of plants has been refined, with family arrived at the site back in 1997. The family really did have a long grass walk flanked by mixed borders their work cut out for them with several barns to convert and a of various colours and a prairie border. a field that was still growing crops. There’s a nut walk to the back of the garden, “We bought the barns with a view to turning the site into a nursery spring, and peony garden for mid-summer and tea shop,” says Debbie. “But we needed to work on converting colour too. today. Over subsequent years, the number which looks especially wonderful in the Nearer to the side of the garden which “After nearly two years of working on the house, we started to borders the A158 is the wildflower meadow work on the gardens, planning and planting and laying border which is a conservatively-mown area of the hedging. Where the gardens are now there used to be a ploughed garden designed to provide a home for field, so there wasn’t an awful lot to work with.” butterflies and bees. >>
>> Just near the entrance to the house is a potager, too, which is planted with herbs and vegetables and to the front of the house, just adjacent to the nursery and teashop, is a gravel garden with all sorts of alpines.
Whilst most gardens concentrate on midsummer interest, Goltho House has been thoughtfully created to ensure all-year-round interest. This month the autumn garden beyond the nut walk area is set to be a real treat for visitors to the garden’s NGS event on 27th September.
“Creating places in the garden that reflected the beauty and uniqueness of each season was really important to us,” says Debbie.
“The garden is laid out with a strong feeling of colour, form and texture in both flowers and foliage which reflects our interest in a wide range of plants, including some rare
and unusual ones. We wanted to inspire not just experienced gardeners but also less experienced gardeners to prove that all-yearround beauty in the garden is achievable.”
At the moment the NGS is recommending that certain gardens use a ticketing system to pre-allocate spaces to visitors. As Pride goes to press it’s not clear whether that system will be lifted. However, there’s no need to be concerned with missing out on Goltho Gardens as the site is also open to visitors until the end of March from Thursdays to Sundays.
“We do love the garden, and we really enjoy it when visitors come, recognise how much work is invested in maintaining the place and when we see our regular visitors who want to sit in their favourite spot and just enjoy some peace and quiet.”
“We’re hugely grateful to our volunteer gardeners who enjoy the site so much that they help us with the seemingly infinite number of hours it takes to complete jobs like weeding. All of our volunteers share our passion for the gardens and we simply couldn’t manage without them!”
n Goltho Gardens is located on Lincoln Road, Goltho, Market Rasen, Lincolnshire, LN8 5NF. Call 01673 857768 or see golthogardens.com.
