It continues to be another busy month in the garden despite having finally recovered from the onslaught of stormy weather. Spring is in full bloom with colour popping at every turn. Everything is beginning to grow, bud up and turn green which is a welcomed sight, but with all this growth comes maintenance for us gardeners.
With the final few stems of Hydrangeas coming to an end we have turned our sights to bamboo, flower shows and making sure the garden looks tip top for arguably its best time of year. Read on to see everything that’s been going on behind the scenes to prepare for the spring season.
Refreshing Mallard Bridge
The planting around Mallard Bridge has clung on long through the winter this year and we have only this month cut back all the herbaceous plants that have finally died off. Herbaceous perennials die back in the winter and often require cutting right back before they reshoot again in spring. We spent time cutting down brown, straggly Persicaria, removing old flower spikes from Eryngium pandanifolium and chopping down slimy Hedechiums. It is amazing just how much material you can remove to clear space ready for all the fresh growth and colour to pop through over the next few months.
Bamboo Protection
If you have recently been to the garden, you might have noticed the plastic tubes around the Phyllostachys edulis bamboo. These are guards which we put around the new shoots in a race against the squirrels who like to eat them before they harden up. We try to catch the shoots early by checking most days but it can be challenging given how fast these canes can grow. They grow from shoot to full size in a matter of months which is an unbelievable feat. Keep your eyes peeled to watch their progress.
Making an entrance
By the entrance to Trebah, our fairly new Beech hedge planting has had its first cut. Cutting a hedge helps to encourage thickening and makes it more solid. We spent a morning weeding the ground underneath and applying a layer of mulch; this acts as a weed suppressant as well as keeping moisture locked into the soil to keep the plants healthy and prevent disease.
Hydrangea heaven
With the hydrangeas reaching imminent completion in the valley, we turned our hands to the harder to reach areas on the inner edges of Mallard Pond; these are much harder to prune without going swimming. We took to the water on our trusty little boat to finish those last, danger zone shrubs! We use the boat to carefully prune any flower heads hanging over the water that we couldn’t reach from the land and it is the perfect victory lap celebration we need after the longest prune on record due to Storm Goretti. I would like to thank all our amazing volunteers who have completed the Hydrangea Valley prune this year almost fully unaided by the garden team.
Fantastic flower shows
It’s been a very busy month for Trebah both in and out of the gardens this March. We headed to Princess Pavilions a few weeks ago for the Falmouth Spring Flower Show with a van bursting with shrubs and flowers to display Trebah’s best. We spent the day polishing leaves and delicately placing arrangements into vases for judging later in the day. We were thankful to receive a great array of Gold, Silver and Bronze places to add to our fruitful history at the show.
We also represented Trebah in Cornwall Garden Society Show last weekend in the exhibit showing Ornamental trees and shrubs. This meant cutting and transporting enough material to fill at least 9 large vases all the way up to the Royal Cornwall Showground. The judges were clearly happy with our extensive variety of plants and we received first place along with the prestigious Rosemary Cobbald-Sawle Cup. It is such a special experience to be a part of our local flower shows; getting to interact with other gardens and gardeners, letting the public experience the hard work that goes into growing and displaying the plants, and being proud to showcase the beauty and breadth of what our wonderful Cornish gardens have to offer.
Overall a very varied and successful month in the garden in many ways as we enter into spring. It has been a great time to look around and appreciate the garden in all of its glory whilst the quiet stillness remains before the buzz of summer starts to creep in. I feel incredibly lucky to work in such a beautiful, diverse and meaningful garden and I can’t wait to reap the rewards of warmer weather after surviving a pretty tough winter.
