May Rumblings

What a difference a week makes, gone from the miserable, wet and windy weather to a week of beautiful sunshine, or so I’m told so lets hope it continues until at least you are reading this! I spent this weekend in my own garden while the guy on the nursery were constructing our newest project, Caragh Nursery Park. We had seen whilst on one of our trips to Italy a unique and attractive way that one of the many nurseries in the area of Pistoia in Tuscany was displaying some of the biggest and most mature of their trees, in more of a parkland setting rather than the usual rows of trees that make it harder for you to see and also harder for me to photograph and video for the website and all that. So the idea of Caragh Nursery Park was started, we have spent a year in the planning stage and the right trees displayed in the right way and now finally it is coming into fruition. The park is being populated with some of our most impressive of trees and plant sculptures. The signs are with the printer and the benches too are on the way, so we are all set to be ready for the coming weeks. It’s so exciting having new projects to concentrate on.

Any visitors to the nursery can see our work in progress and each day we go out the gate we are amazed at how fantastic it is now it all starting to take shape. We are alongside this working on another project which I’ll fill you over the next week or two.

So what’s happening in the garden? As you will have seen over the last few weeks, everything is getting very green and the odd few plants are flowering already, my lupins are now in flower an lots of stems coming through every day, my are paeonia has flowers already although the bush form is only just forming the globes of colour so another few weeks before we see them. My Viburnum is in full flower and looking spectacular and the Rhododendron is in full swing. I was very disappointed that my Magnolia looks like it has died, I actually don’t have an explanation of why but I know the soil was very rich there so I guess it didn’t like that, plants are living and sometimes they just take turn, nothing I could have done but what do I replace it with? I’m not sure yet but I’ll find something.

Next week is RHS Chelsea week so I’ll be all of all things garden design and lots of insights into the gardens and my take on them, with some behind the scenes looks at the plant lists of the designers. Can’t wait, I love Show Garden season.