On the Ground

On the 24th of July, our fellow gardener, Trevor, completed the final day of his charity fell walking for My Name’5 Doddie Foundation. Trevor has walked over Wansfell every day for a year, sometimes multiple times in one day, come rain or shine (mostly our famous Lake District rain). This equates to over 180,000m of ascent, or around 20 ascents of Everest. His dedication, kindness, and sheer energy have amazed all of us.

To celebrate Trevor’s hard work and success raising money for Motor Neurone Disease, he was joined by the garden team, along with other colleagues from Langdale Chase, and friends. Luckily, we were blessed with a warm sunny day, champagne, and cake.

Well done, Trevor, and thank you to everyone who donated.

If you would like to donate to this worthy cause, please click here.

– Claire

By June, our roses have become a floriferous and prolific feature in the garden, and now is a good time to appreciate the success of our hard work maintaining them. There is no doubt that our earlier visit from the David Austin rose consultants in March gave us the ability to reinvigorate some of the varieties that were previously struggling. The elegant shrub rose ‘Penelope Lively’ has mid-pink, cupped blooms in open sprays. With her medium-strong fruity scent, she is the embodiment of summertime. Our appropriately named rambler, ‘The Lady of the Lake’, is beginning to soften the railings above the car park, its pale pink flowers and fresh fragrance welcoming guests on arrival. Shrub rose ‘The Lark Ascending’ really is ascending, an incredibly healthy and vigorous rose with graceful semi-double apricot flowers.

– Claire

Rabbits are particularly fond of tender, young plants, whose softness and high nutritional content provide a food source. We have trialled multiple methods to try to protect new planting – organic sprays, which alter the taste of the plant but cause no harm to the rabbit, barrier methods, and encouraging natural predators through habitat provision. Unfortunately, we are not frequently blessed with the dry weather required for effective spraying, and there seem to be more rabbits than natural predators can handle! As such, we have found the most effective measure has been the creation of barriers, either through fencing or attractive guards around individual plants themselves. All guards have been created using materials foraged from the grounds and artistically arranged by our gardener, Alex. Thankfully, we can now see many of our damaged plants recovering and far fewer rabbits gaining access to our site on its northern boundary.

– Claire

Due to our weather, soil, and pest-related difficulties, we decided to start many of our susceptible late spring-flowering bulbs in pots in the autumn. The tulips we subsequently planted have been a real showstopper around the entrance and terrace areas. Here we have three different cultivars: ‘Burgundy Lace’, ‘Ballerina’, and ‘Princess Irene’, which together contrast in colour, height, and flower texture, and pop against the paler Narcissus varieties surrounding them, which we planted last season. The Allium ‘Gladiator’ also garnered much admiration from guests. Its giant heads, spreading over 20cm in diameter, contain countless miniature florets, each a rich pink or rose-purple. They’re also magnets for bees, and standing at over 1 metre tall, they add valuable height and interest to the borders.

– Claire

Due to the wet and stormy winter of 2023/2024, soil compaction, and our cute but formidably pesky rabbit friends, many of our new plants in our exciting garden redesign project failed. This was most noticeable in the borders surrounding our beautiful terrace – a prime spot for our guests to relax and be enveloped by nature. To resolve this and improve the guest experience in this key area, we began moving out surviving plants, hand-digging and improving both the soil structure and composition, to a depth of 850mm, in our worst-affected section. By Maytime, we finished re-planting according to the original planting plan provided by Creative Landscapes to recover this area to its former glory!

– Claire

In March, we were very kindly visited by two rose consultants, Joseph and Nathan, from David Austin Roses – the company that supplied us with 80 roses in the first phase of our garden redesign. Conscious of giving all our plants the very best start, we knew that we would benefit from their expertise on all rose-related matters, and they did not disappoint. From feeding to pruning, optimum positioning to disease control in a rose’s early years and beyond, they armed us with detailed and up-to-date information. As a bonus, they replaced some of our roses that had failed up to this point as part of their guarantee! A very valuable afternoon for the garden team, many thanks to David Austin Roses for providing such great aftercare.

– Claire

We’ve all been admiring our newly planted multi-stem Amelanchier ‘Lamarkii’ trees around the entrances this month. A truly graceful tree, with an open branching structure, it is covered in small, star-shaped white flowers which appear in unison with the emergence of bronze-tinged young leaves. This provides a beautiful and eye-catching contrast. Having had time to settle in the ground, they have flowered better than last year.

– Claire

Many plants selected by our designers have been chosen for their seasonal interest. This ensures that our guests can always enjoy flowers, scent, and structure in the garden, whatever the time of year. One of our first bulbs to bloom is Crocus ‘Flower Record’. Its delightful cups of violet mauve open up to reveal bright orange stigmata when the early spring sun shines on the flower. Our Acer palmatum ‘Sango Kaku’, also known as the Coral bark Maple, has multiple seasons of interest. In winter, it reveals a structure of bright red stems that glow as they catch the low winter sun. Our harbinger of spring, the Cornus Mas, really steals the show, though. With bright flowers on bare stems before its leaves appear, it creates a striking display of yellow froth.

– Claire

In an effort to increase biodiversity and habitats for pollinators, we are allowing meadows to form along the lakeside.

These will be delineated from the lawns with a crisp mown edge, to strike a balance between nature and the manicured garden. Although this gives us some relief from of our mowing duties, it does take some management to remove vigorous species that would usually dominate other wildflowers.

Keep an eye out for: Conopodium majus, Cardamine pratensis, Veronica camaedrys, Ajuga reptans, Trifolium repens and lotus corniculatus.

– Alex

The first phase of our exciting garden redesign project included the planting of many large and mature specimens, such as the monumental Taxus baccata pyramids by the hotel entrance and the row of cherries – Prunus x subhirtella ‘Autumnalis Rosea’ in the drop off area. Mature specimens like these require a lot of watering throughout the growing season until their roots are well established; typically two to three years. One of the best attributes of the hotel is the terrace and the view – no other hotel can boast such a prominent Windermere lakeshore location! To care for our plants whilst minimising disturbance to our guests enjoying the terrace, we decided to install a leaky hose irrigation system. We have carefully (and painstakingly!) laid hundreds and hundreds of metres of leaky pipe, controlled by valve boxes which are, in turn, turned on/off by rain sensors. We’ve then buried these lengths of hose to make the whole system as discreet as possible. The irony is not lost on us in the garden team that for much of our irrigation install, we were working in the rain! It has been a steep learning curve for all of us but testament again to the resilience and hard work of the garden team to complete this project before the warm weather (hopefully) reaches us.

– Claire

As the buds begin to swell on our roses and climbers, we have the luxury of being able to apply a generous mulch of Thwaites’ own produced manure. Supplied by the brewery’s own Shire horses, and fed on a diet of hay and spent barley.

We have fed around 80 roses and climbers, giving the new plants a great start for their first spring in the garden.

– Alex

The addition of the beautiful copper lights left us with some unpleasant electrical cabling in the original Mawson rockery. Charlotte and Alex did a fantastic job moving in stones and positioning them to look as if they’ve always been there, masking these cables. The lower sections were completely overwhelmed by ferns too, which offered an additional challenge. Most were removed but some were re-positioned to poke out from behind rocks, and the smaller, more delicate plants moved into the new planting pockets created. We have grand plans for this area – watch this space!

– Claire

Our yew (Taxus baccata) topiary pyramids have been bearing the brunt of the season’s gale force winds and it was clear they needed some additional support. Here Trevor and I are, taking turns hammering in the platypus anchoring system. This is a discreet, underground system for stabilising our mature root ball specimens, removing the need for any unsightly overground staking – let the focus be the beautiful planting!

– Claire

In an effort to help and encourage wildlife within the garden, we have installed a number of bird feeders in two sheltered locations. Here you can see 4 Long Tailed Tits on one feeder (spot the fourth bird’s tail poking out from behind the feeder).

This initiative has been spearheaded by fellow gardener Trevor, who has a background in wildlife conservation, and a wealth of knowledge for all things avian (Spot Trevor in the second photo).

We have also taken part in the RSPB’s 45th Big Garden Birdwatch and recorded the results of an hour of birdwatching…

9 Blue Tit
5 Great Tit
3 Coal Tit
2 Chaff Finch
1 Green Finch
2 Gold Finch
2 Bull Finch
1 Nut Hatcher
2 Robin
1 Dunnock
1 Great Speckled Woodpecker
3 Black birds
2 Crow
1 Goldcrest

– Alex