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Gardening
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Castle Gardens, New Road, Sherborne, Dorset DT9 5NR www.thegardensgroup.co.uk thegardensgroup While enjoying your garden at its best, August is a great time to plan for late summer, autumn and springtime colour.
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Bulbs, pansies, violas and chrysanthemums can all be sown at this time of year, giving you a more established plant come spring, which will flower for even longer. With our social distancing measures in place, you can pick up your seeds, bulbs, pots and propagators any day of the week, during our new opening hours:
Monday to Saturday: 9am – 4pm Sunday: 10am – 4:30pm
For those still stuck at home, you can place your orders by telephone or email, and we’ll deliver free within 25 miles.
01935 814633 castle@thegardensgroup.co.uk
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WHOSE GARDEN IS IT ANYWAY? Mike Burks, Managing Director, The Gardens Group
One of the remarkable things about the last few months is how beneficial it has been to wildlife; something we’ve noticed in the garden centre in a number of striking ways.
At Castle Gardens, we have a huge bird population, including an enormous sparrow colony in the ivy and wisteria on the wall of the car park. Their noisy goodnatured bickering is continuous! Inside the centre, we have a large number of robins and blackbirds. The robins are, of course, always brave and will be interested in what’s going on. When the lockdown began, it only took them a short time to move into the greenhouse and the shop, using some of the shelving in which to build their nests, whilst there weren’t any customers around. They attended every tea break, picking up any crumbs left from Carol’s excellent cakes and biscuits, which were another lockdown highlight.
The blackbirds also became braver and started to use buildings for their nests, luckily completing broods before we reopened. One of their nests was in a large lemon tree within the Butterfly House and the materials used show just how good nature is at recycling!
Artmim/Shutterstock
The weather in April and May was of course warm for the season and butterflies and bees were in good numbers. In the restaurant garden, I sowed a damaged pack of mixed wildflower seed over the existing wildflower border and before long, a huge number of poppies and cornflower were in full bloom. The bee activity on the poppies in particular was quite extraordinary. Butterflies too enjoyed this weather and although we didn’t have time to run our usual moth monitoring traps, I’m pretty sure they were plentiful.
It also seems that insects splattered on windscreens have made a comeback. Some say that the reason windscreens aren’t covered in insects is that cars have become more aerodynamic, but I have noticed greater numbers on the few occasions I’ve driven in the dark. The bats also seem to have been enjoying themselves.
I’ve spotted a number of slow worms in the garden and then we found some young slow worms in a rolled-up piece of old carpet in one of the sheds at the back of the garden centre. I call it old carpet, but in my interaction with the excellent Dorset Wildlife Trust they referred to it as a ‘hibernaculum,’ which sounds much grander!
As we were getting the restaurant garden ready for reopening, I disturbed a beautiful frog who must be using the Fat Fish Aquatics pond. Frogs have a had a tough time in recent years, so it was great to see him. There is still plenty of cover for frog and human to co-exist in the garden, so you may spot him too in the coming weeks.
The best spot of the year though has been a large adult hedgehog that I came across very early one morning by the offices. We looked at each other and agreed to go our separate ways. We met several times in the very early morning after that, but also once during the middle of the day in front of the restaurant conservatory. Hedgy made a half-hearted attempt to roll up but decided against it and just trotted on.
A few days later, one of the team heard some scrabbling in a drain and rescued a baby hedgehog. Just minutes later, a second was found in the gents’ toilets, perhaps giving us a clue as to its sex! We have often seen hedgehogs around, but it was the first time we have seen any so young.
PPE is something that we are all getting used to but of course, for the hedgehog, personal protective equipment is issued as standard.
DIARY OF A FLOWER FARMER Paul Stickland, Black Shed Flowers
Just as the flowers change week by week and provide us with an ever-changing palette of sometimes unexpected combinations, so do our days. It’s fair to say that no two days are the same at Black Shed. Last year was a little more predictable, we had a calendar full of weddings, our weeks would have a certain shape; picking from dawn on a Wednesday in preparation for the weekend’s weddings, a flurry of florists visiting - picking for their brides and grooms, collecting buckets full of colour, and late nights on Thursdays and Fridays, preparing buttonholes and bridal bouquets. The gasps of excitement as our couples first see their flowers, giggles as we try to squeeze far too many exuberant stems into far too small a car.
We’ve missed that but weddings are returning slowly. We’ve just supplied flowers for our first Zoom wedding. Quite who was where in the world we’re not sure, but I am hoping that at least the bride and groom were in the same room! Next week, we have a ’real’ wedding, small and cautious but a proper wedding with all the trimmings for a lovely couple in their seventies, who planned to marry abroad but had got caught in the lockdown. The moment restrictions were lifted and accepting the first available date, they had little hope of being able to organise wedding flowers at such short notice. Turning up, quite unannounced, after a kind recommendation from their chosen venue, they couldn’t believe their eyes when we guided them round the farm, completely covered in gorgeous flowers, choosing their favourites and simply loving the experience. Their joy was so infectious, holding hands like teenagers, there may have been a tear or two… Priceless.
Next year will be chock full of weddings I suspect and not just at the weekends either, so our weeks will change again. We’ll have to try and plan for that somehow! Meantime, every day brings its own surprises, a flurry of orders, a feature in a magazine, a newspaper article, a film crew, photographers, perhaps a famous florist, a phone call from a friend who can’t believe that the guy who used to paint dinosaurs is now peddling dahlias. Sometimes it can be a lovely natter with an old gardening friend, a kind gift of a cutting, a thoughtful gift of freshly gathered delphinium seed, the lovely lady who brought us a car full of Honesty, or our friend, Japanese cloud-pruning expert, Jake Hobson of Niwaki.com, bearing a sack full of foliage from his precious cryptomerias.
Then of course there are the flowers. Getting up at first light; the first inspection of the field is always bound to reveal something new and exciting, someone new to the party and there’s the bees and me waiting to greet them. Try as we may to plan for the future, in the midst of unusual times, living in these moments is a most extraordinary gift and joy.
blackshedflowers.blogspot.co.uk @blackshedflowers
