another garden visit

It only rained lightly this morning, and I took the opportunity to clean out the annexe to the chicken house where the hens are supposed to lay.  Only the old lady hen is on-lay at the moment.  The new little hens haven't started yet, nor have they started roosting on the perch at night.  Instead they all sleep crammed into the egg box, which means that they crap in it.  Hens must be instinctively hygienic creatures, and the old lady hen will not lay in the egg box if it gets mucky.  I am hoping that the Speckledies will discover how to roost like grown up chickens fairly soon, since it is a nuisance to have them shitting in the egg box.  They are having a dismal time of it in this weather, with no free ranging in the afternoon, and nothing much to do but shuffle between the sodden straw in their run, and the chicken house.  Chickens enjoy sunbathing, by the way, when there is any sun.

Then, as it was still only raining a bit, we went to see Olivers garden on the south side of Colchester, open today and tomorrow for the National Gardens Scheme.  Lots of new houses have been built on that side of town, on what was MoD land.  Turning off the new roundabout down Olivers Lane, within seconds you have entered a different world.  It's a single track lane with passing places, fields on either side, and a livery stables.  Two young women were riding down the lane ahead of us, one bare-back on a fat brown pony with a cream coloured tail.  At the end of the lane lies the Roman River, its flanks lined with poplars, bronze new leaves unfolding.  Towns that stop abruptly at the countryside are not the sole province of the north.

Olivers was looking very nice.  I heard the chap organising the (badly signposted) car park telling the couple ahead of us that this was the last year they'd be opening.  I don't know if that means for the Yellow Book Scheme, or at all.  They're open tomorrow as well, so seize the moment while you can (taking an umbrella).  There is a gravel turning circle in front of a plain, handsome red brick eighteenth century house, with a flower bed in the middle, currently home to a cheerful mixture of tulips and wallflowers.  There is a plant stall, where I snapped up a well-branched black aeonium for six pounds (I have some cuttings in the conservatory, but they were struck very late and it has been cold in there all winter, so they aren't looking great).

You go through a gate in the wall into the main garden.  In front of the house is a large terrace, paving reassuringly uneven and furniture cheerfully mismatched.  There is a box parterre (new growth slightly frosted.  Our box at home is the same) filled in with a really good display of tulips and wallflowers.  They were serving teas in a charming Gothick timber arcade at the end of the house, though we didn't have any tea, because we'd gone before lunch to miss the worst of the forecast rain.  A huge lawn sweeps down towards the Roman River, giving excellent views out over an un-built on and unspoiled landscape.  On the right hand side of the garden are big curving borders and a yew corridor with planting bays along one side.  Euphorbias, tulips and crown imperial fritillaries are looking good now, and there is more to come later.  On the left hand side of the garden are two big ponds, stream fed, and beyond the stretch of mown lawn the grass is left to grow long, with paths cut through it, currently studded with cowslips.

The formal garden is fenced, as various notices put it, to keep the dogs in and the rabbits out.  Gates in the fence let you through into a wood, which is a sheet of bluebells.  There are some azaleas and rhododendrons, and some nice exotic trees.  I noticed the peeling bark of Prunus serrula.  But the real point at this time of the year is the bluebells.  They are such an intense shade of blue.  The woodland area is larger than I remembered from my previous visit one July, when I suppose it was not doing very much.  The land gathers into a little valley, lined with bluebells, with a stream running along the bottom, with the leaves of iris and what might have been giant hogweed.  I'm not that well up on umbellifers, but I didn't touch it to be on the safe side.  It had bristly stems and didn't look like a plant you'd want to stroke.

There is a nice summerhouse among the formal borders, based on a William Kent design at Rousham, which echoes the covered arcade at the other end of the house, and some artworks around the garden and in the wood (along with memorial tablets to Dido and Homer, presumably dogs).  I'd have liked to see a couple more statues, one to act as an eye catcher when seen across the garden from the yew walk, and another as a punctuation point at the end of one of the paths cut into the long grass.

A handout told us that the soil is mostly thin sand with bands of clay, which is what we have at home.  We share storms and rabbits with them as well, and a disinclination to use much in the way of chemicals.  Olivers is a much larger and grander garden than ours, with a house to act as backdrop which is in a different league, but one of the things I like about visiting private gardens is that they give some ideas about what can be achieved on a domestic scale.  Gardens run as businesses, with full-time staff and eager horticultural trainees, or with the resources of major charities behind them, can be interesting and beautiful to visit, and there is always lots to learn, if you keep your eyes about you, but for inspiration for gardening at home visiting good private gardens still on a (large) domestic scale has a lot going for it.

By the time we left the owner, Gay Edwards, had taken over as ticket seller, and she hailed us cheerfully, as if she recognised me from my place of work (which is possible), but she may just have beautiful manners.  I congratulated her on how good the garden looked, and commiserated that the weather was so unkind.  It is a very nice garden, and I was pleased to go and support it, particularly if this is their last year of opening.  It is such a pity that the weekend is so wet and grim.  So many gardens are opening for charity, and I can imagine the work that has gone into planning things like pots of tulips since last autumn, and all the extra bits of planting being finished somehow in the past six months, and the last minute edging and weeding, as well as the friends and relatives roped in to help with the plant stall, and cakes, and car parking.  And then if it pours hardly anybody will come.  There are a couple of woods near us opening too, for the bluebells, to raise money for their respective churches, and as we drove home we saw a pair of cars with sopping wet white ribbon fastened to their bonnets, so people's weddings are being rained on as well.