Garden report: Easter Sunday (April 4th, 2010)

Thank you to all those who visited us today for our first day of opening this year.  We were all rewarded with sunshine and a brisk breeze.

During the summer season, we quite often get our regular visitors ring us up and ask whether they might know if the x, y or z has come into flower yet.  Usually it's the wisteria, sometimes the magnolia, on occasion the cherry blossom.  Well, we're absolutely delighted that people want to know, so please, don't feel embarrassed or apologetic about asking - we'd much rather you saw what you wanted to see, than that you arrived expecting wisteria and found you'd missed it by a day or two, or whatever.  Instead, be proud to be an Ifordian, part of that select club of people that are 'in the know', and keep in touch!

To make things a bit easier, and very much on the basis that a picture is worth a thousand words, as the summer season progresses we're aiming to post (at least fortnightly, if not weekly) a short pictorial report on the current plant-situation in the garden.  This will act as an opportunity to see what you missed if you didn't visit last week, and also to show you what you might expect to see if you were to visit in the next couple of weeks.

And here is the garden report issued from the Iford office at 19.00 hours on Easter Sunday:

Blooming marvellously are:

Clematis armandii on the front of the house

Grape Hyacinth

Fritillary (with a pair of anemonies)

Camellia by the loggia

Iford's native buxus sempervirens (and what a crop of seeds we had!) which grows to 40 feet

And budding up nicely are:

Ornamental cherry on the top lawn

Cotton buds on the ornamental willow

Fig on the South Wall of the Cloister

Clematis montana rubens in the Cloister

Japanese White Iris kaempferi in the Oriental Garden

Magnolia soulangiana by the Loggia

Tree Peony lutaeia (probably not 'ludlowii')

Wisteria sinensis on the Casita

And not forgetting the orchard...