A summer cottage garden

One of my unexpected highlights from our recent break in Lincolnshire was our visit to Barnsdale Gardens. Before we arrived in our holiday cottage I’d not heard about these gardens, but they were in the recommended places to visit, so I took a look. And as soon as I did, they went straight onto our ‘to visit’ list.

Barnsdale is the Gardeners’ World home of former presenter Geoff Hamilton, and it’s where the programme was filmed. It’s a garden full of gardens, described as a gardener’s theme park - there’s thirty eight individual gardens in the garden. I thought I’d diligently photographed every single garden, but somehow I don’t have all the photos.

Never mind.

I’m starting by sharing garden number twenty eight - a summer cottage garden.

This garden was built as the main show garden for the very first Gardeners’ World Live Exhibition at the NEC in 1993 and was designed by Dan Pearson. Isn’t it delighful?

Originally the maze was a herb maze - filled with silver variegated thyme, lavender, rosemary and sage - imagine the smell! The Barnsdale gardens are heavy soil and the herbs didn’t thrive, so was replaced with a box hedge.

The archways are covered in roses, and like many cottage gardens there’s delphiniums, more roses, campanula, geraniums, foxgloves and clematis.

It’s exactly the type of garden that you could easily see in a domestic garden, and wouldn’t that be something to aim at?

I loved the strategically well-placed deckchair, which on a warmer day would I’m sure be in much demand.

Post Comment Love 10-12 September

Welcome to this week’s #PoCoLo - a friendly linky which I co-host with Suzanne, where you can link any post published in the last week. We know you’ll find some great posts to read, and maybe some new-to-you blogs too, so do pop over and visit some of the posts linked and share some of that love. If you were here last week it was great to have you along, if you’re new here this week we’re pleased you’re here.

We’ve had some lovely weather here this week, and have even managed a barbecue or two - though the evening ones are trickier as it’s getting dark so early now. It means though that it was the perfect timing for the post I’ve linked this week, and the lights themselves were super useful, as well as pretty.

We’re heading out for a meal tomorrow night in one of the fine dining local restaurants, and one we’ve been to a few times now over the pandemic. It will be its usual feast I’m sure, and it’s the type of place that we keep an eye on the seasonal menu which changes monthly, and after spotting guinea fowl on the menu it didn’t take long to make that booking.

You are invited to the Inlinkz link party!

Click here to enter

Repurposing an empty or two

For a while now we’ve been members of the Craft Gin Club, a subscription service which provides a bottle of gin, mixers and nibbles every month. It means we have a fair few bottles of gin, with several on the go at once. But here’s the thing, they’re all generally really pretty bottles and so I was keen to find a way to repurpose them.

I’d seen lights in bottles, and how pretty they were and I bought a box or two much earlier in the summer. They’re easy to fit and use, but that wasn’t my concern. My concern was the slugs and snails slithering over the labels and leaving a trail of destruction. And so, I’ve tried a layer of PVA Glue over them and I’m hoping that will protect the labels for at least a little while.

It’s only now though, that the warmer weather is making a brief return that I’ve been able to try them out. And I’m really pleased with how they’ve worked out, and how much light they give out. Don’t they look great?

I’ve used them in groups of three, some on the table but also on the edge of the grass and on the patio. I never expected them to turn out quite so well.

What do you think?