On the Ground: 2025

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