bty

Moving on the spiders!

It’s nearly Halloween, but we can’t have spiders spoiling our refreshments offer at the last Open Day of the season this Sunday! The Gardens are looking gorgeous, refreshed by the rains and not yet hit by frost! In the Italian Garden thereR ...

bty

Engineers as well as gardeners

Our volunteers are a talented bunch – here, John and Stephen are making great progress installing a ramp into the Italian Garden so that volunteers can wheel their barrows in and out and avoid bumping up and down the newly restored steps! We were vi ...

bdr

Appley Dapply!

In the dappled shade on a glorious September day, Thelma finished beautifying the jams and jellies today, ready for the Apple Day on Sunday. You might call her Appley Dapply! Cressing Temple Barns’ gardening volunteers visited for the day, bringing ...

bty

As good as new

Margaret is doing a fantastic job, painstakingly cleaning up and filling the holes in our mosaic-top tables. The mosaics have a range of lovely designs and were created over 15 years ago by Anne Schwegmann-Fielding working with students from Helena Romane ...

bty

Woodland clearance starts

We now have responsibility for the woodland next to the walled garden – it is very overgrown and uneven underfoot and we expect to find there trash from the second world war as well as more recent stuff as we start to clear it. A good start on anoth ...

bty

Enjoying the queen of games

Croquet was all the rage in the 1860s. The Earl of Essex held lavish croquet parties at Cassiobury House (in Hertfordshire!), launched his own Cassiobury brand croquet set and in 1865 a variation on the then normal game was promoted in the ‘Rules of ...

japanese monks august 2019

Japanese style gardening

Is Steph channelling the Japanese gardeners that Monty Don met, who were removing grass from moss gardens blade by blade? The monks and the rest of the Gardens are looking fit for visitors on Sunday for our first ever celebration  of our Japanese Garden h ...

dav

Hot, hot, hot

On the hottest July day on record, our plucky volunteers still got stuck in …watering of course, but also grass-cutting, weeding, deadheading and carting a load of manure to the Gardens. It’s got to be done!! The butterflies were enjoying the ...

sdr

Stunning!

Open Day visitors on Sunday will love the walled garden and the Italian garden – they are looking stunning! The restoration of the stone steps is nearly finished too. Maggie, our archivist, has also done great work in digging out new stories and pic ...

dav

What a crowd!

It must have been our highest volunteer numbers yet – 27 plus a group of 10 from GSK. So we managed to get masses of jobs done as well as the obligatory watering, given how dry it has been. We were cutting down the now dead cow parsley; cutting off ...

sdr

Not a weedy thistle!

This “scotch thistle” (onopordum acanthium) was probably not planted deliberately but is quite a sight! They are said to top 2.5 metres if well fed….but this one has managed quite well without tlc!  Elsewhere we have been waging war on c ...