New arrival at Dudmaston

Its been a huge couple of weeks here in the gardens at Dudmaston, besides seeing the end of the Rhododendron flowers (some are still clinging on) and the roses breaking buds and filling the garden with scent and colour, there was one new arrival...

My daughter was born! We named her Willow, to go with our son Rowan, attemping to build an arboretum under my own roof. Granted with hindsight it would have been easier to bonzai a few trees and keep them about the house. Live and learn. As such I've been off for 2 weeks on paternity, so I was unable to update with a couple of the more interesting jobs that we did a fortnight ago.

 

The path down into Gerard's wood had been getting more and more overgrown, to the point where it looked less like the entrance into the garden and more an extension of the woods. The aim was to simply carry on the path that the rangers had started on the woodland trail into the gardens. After a day of driving back and forth using one of the rangers pick-ups, we carved out a new pathway running from the gate to the watcher using some fine gravel. Which, all in all, looked quite nice, it was definitely an improvement, to an area which had very little attention to it, but receives a lot of visitor traffic.
 

 

 

 

So after pathing all the way to the watcher, me and Guy stood back and realised something, that it would have quite an impressive views if some of that foliage was cut back. Luckily we had one of our big groups of volunteers in on the following day....

 

I'll have to update in the next couple of days to see how it has settled in, 5 trailer loads of plant material, mostly Alnus (Alder) and Tilia (Lime) so we didn't remove anything terribly interesting, but what we got was totally worth it.