Summer Colour in the South West of England!

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The South West is a very popular region throughout the year but especially in the summer months with so many great places to visit. Chief among them are the coastal resorts of course, but there are a good number of historical gardens for visitors to the region which are justly famed as ‘woodland’ or ‘spring gardens’ with their glorious displays of camellias and rhododendrons during April and May. But what do these gardens offer the summer visitor once they put on their ‘green mantle’ for the summer months?

My garden does not have the tree cover that such plants enjoy, and having started it just 10 years ago from an overgown ruin, I didn’t want to wait 60 plus years for my garden to mature if I followed in the footsteps of these gardens. Instead, from the outset I was intent upon designing my garden for SUMMER COLOUR and I was impatient for results.

I was also new to gardening and had never completed any gardening course before getting my head down and starting ‘Winsford’ – and I still have not signed up for any gardening course. Instead, like so many gardeners of all abilities, I knew what I didn’t like to see in my garden – like straight paths – and just went from there!

Another thing I did not want to see was grass. The word ‘lawn’ is so overstated in my opinion, ‘scrub’ would be nearer the mark for many examples in the summer. Grass never looks good without constant 365-day care, and it requires expensive equipment and a place to store it and maintain that equipment which also takes up space. So grass was out, and because grass is out at Winsford, the planting is so much more concentrated without vast areas to walk between in comparison with other gardens to visit. In fact, I actually work fewer hours maintaining my gardens each week during the summer than my neighbours who have equivalent areas of grass that requires strimming and a ride-on mower!

My restoration work, the hard-landscaping and 90% of the planting was ‘complete’ within 5 years. The next 5 years were spenting watching it mature and ‘fine-tuning’ the results which can be seen daily between April and November and also at www.winsfordwalledgarden.com

If there is one word that is most used to describe the results by visitors that word is ‘INSPIRATIONAL’.

What IS new today is the YOUTUBE VIDEO I made just yesterday which describes part of the gardens that visitors can see today and which is on the front page of my website. I hope you like the result and ‘thank you’ for reading.