Sit down for a few minutes and let’s have a cup of tea; I’d like to tell you about an amazing garden we saw earlier in the summer.
Let’s take a walk through Quarry Park, Shrewsbury, England and let’s tour the Dingle. As we walk over the Severn River and head towards beautiful serene St. Chad’s church, we look to our left and there it is. This stunning garden suddenly appears as the ground drops away towards a curving, downhill path leading into what used to be a quarry. The www.visitshrewsbury.co.uk site describes the Dingle like this: “At the centre of The Quarry Park in Shrewsbury is the Dingle, formerly a stone Quarry but now a floral masterpiece created by world renowned gardener Percy Thrower of Blue Peter fame. He was Shrewsbury’s Park Superintendent for 28 years. The Dingle is a beautiful sunken garden landscaped with alpine borders, colourful bedding plants, shrubbery and water features. There are seasonal floral displays here all year round, (which in no small part have helped to secure Shrewsbury’s Britain in Bloom status). The Dingle’s ornamental gardens opened in 1879 and a statue of Sabrina, goddess of the River Severn, can still be seen today.”
This garden was full of surprises for me, the first one being that there were so many familiar plants: marigolds forming neat borders, delicate grasses wafting gently at the centre of meandering flowerbeds, begonias popping with color in shady spots. It was good to see so many familiar flower friends while we were so far from home!
The second surprise was the abundance with which the flowers were planted: row upon row, planters bursting with lively color, there was no holding back the exuberance of the plantings! This was a lesson to me: with our short growing season, it makes sense to go “all-out” and fill our planters to get the overflowing look that we want as quickly as possible. I read somewhere that there are more than 300,000 plants in the Dingle, imagine that!
The third surprise was the glorious abandon of color; you know that expression, “if it grows together, it goes together”? That was certainly true here. The reds and blues were planted close together: pop! Oranges and purples: another pop! So many bright colors so close together, and yet it never seemed too much or out of place. All was balanced by delicate grasses, graceful trees, and pruned shrubbery.
I also loved the interesting architectural details through the garden: columns, statues, and sparkling water features, so welcome and cooling on that hot summer day!
These are all things that we can incorporate in some fashion in our own gardens. It is not the size of the plantings, but the techniques that we can borrow from those wonderful Dingle gardeners.
And if we were there now, I think our garden tour would have to end with a cream tea: a hot pot of fragrant tea, a raisin scone covered with butter, some strawberry jam, and then a big dollop of that amazing clotted cream! Don’t worry about calories; we’ve worn them off during our garden walk!
The Yorkton and District Horticultural Society has interesting things coming up, beginning with our first regular meeting on September 16; our Fall Plant and Bulb Sale on September 25; and the SHA Provincial Convention and AGM, held in Yorkton on October 23 and 24 and hosted by our group. Just log on to www.yorktonhort.ca for all the details and join us!
Have a great week, and enjoy your gardens!
