 The Queens Garden at Sudeley Castle. Image supplied by kind permission of Sudeley Castle More on garden visitingDecoding the garden guide books Chatsworth The Good Gardens Guide database More on cultivating flowersAll about orchids Clematis: a flower for every day of the year More gardening How to prune shrubs Mulch to save moisture Pros and cons of peat-free compost
More from SagaPeople: the shopkeeper who took on Tesco Life changes: Cut the commute Health: the natural health service Relationships: living apart together Money: making downsizing pay
Technology: green computing
Blogs: Terry Walton's allotment diaries 
|
|
Sudeley Castle
Discover magical Sudely Castle - and the secret of its successful organic rose garden Sudeley Castle has a fairytale, sleeping beauty-like air, which no doubt was one of the reasons why celebrity model Liz Hurley chose it as the setting for her spectacular wedding to Arun Nayar earlier this year.
Home of Lady Ashcombe and the Dent-Brocklehurst family, this 15-century castle near Winchcombe in Gloucestershire is part stately dwelling and, thanks to Cromwell’s troops during the civil war, part romantic ruin. Unkempt scramblings of roses through broken window tracery and wanton festoons of rare climbers clinging to crumbling buttresses provide a picturesque backdrop for the ten sumptuous gardens that have been laid out among the cannon scarred walls.
The centrepiece of these is The Queens Garden, commemorating two queens who each called Sudeley home - Katherine Parr (who is buried in the chapel here) and the unfortunate teenager who reigned for only nine days, Lady Jane Grey.
This garden is enclosed by strapping Victorian double yew hedges and ample mounds of clipped topiary and is actually laid out on the site of the original Tudor parterre. It is famous for its collection of old roses whose origins span the castle’s rich history, but in Tudor times would have been planted with herbs and possibly vegetables as well.
To acknowledge this, the roses are mingled with rosemary and lavender and soft spheres of allium and bounded by low hedges of teucrium. In summer the sweet scents of some eight hundred old roses combine with the spicily pungent notes of the herbs to create overwhelming fragrance.
The fifteen acres of gardens at Sudeley are managed organically and head gardener Alistair McBarnet is proud that The Queens Garden is one of the very few rose gardens in the country to achieve this. He was more than happy to share a few of his top tips for organic rose growing with Saga.
“We always use ‘Rootgrow’, which is a powder containing friendly fungi, when we plant bare rooted roses,” he explained. “This creates better, healthier plants, although it must be in direct contact with the roots so, unfortunately, it won’t work for container grown roses.”
“We prune in January and feed with pelleted chicken manure in April, then after they have finished their first flush of flowering, say in July or early August, we feed them again,” says Alistair, before going on to explain his most intriguing tip so far.
“In the autumn we put on powdered gypsum,” he confides, which suggests more than a hint of alchemy. As it happens, this is not far from the truth, as gypsum is a mineral with multiple transforming properties connected with improving clay soils and making them more hospitable for plants. “We first started using it three or four years ago,” Alistair recalls. “Then last summer I realised that the roses hadn’t looked that good for five or six years.”
“After the gypsum we put on a thick blanket of rotted horse manure as a mulch, which traps black spot spores and suchlike in the ground and after that we try never to disturb the soil,” Alistair explains.
While weeding and hoeing might have been abolished among the roses, it is very much in evidence in Sudeley’s demonstration Victorian Kitchen garden, which is designated a Heritage Seed Library Garden. Here the gardeners work in association with the Henry Doubleday Research Organisation (now called Garden Organic) to grow and preserve rare and endangered vegetables, and each year seed harvested here is returned to Garden Organic to help ensure the survival of unusual and unfashionable varieties.
Conservation and protection of endangered species is also a feature of Sudeley’s pheasantry, a collection of exotic birds established three years ago in association with the world Pheasant Association and most recently, Sudeley’s gardens have become the setting for the Landart project, in which contemporary artists are given the opportunity to create new work in the historic surroundings of the castle and its grounds.
InformationSudeley Castle Gardens
Winchcombe
Gloucestershire
GL54 5JD
Tel 01242 602308
www.sudeleycastle.co.uk
Open from 31st March – 28th October 10.30am to 5.00pm daily Admissions pricesPlease check Sudeley Castle's website for up-to-date admission prices Written by Gill Guest
This article was created: 26 April 2007.
This article was last edited: 26 April 2007.
 Email  Back to top
|
