A Cornish Garden

The East side of the garden, showing the top retaining wall.  You might spot the top of a huge rock protruding from the ground.  This was uncovered when the ground was being levelled, and it being too big to move, was kept as a feature.  Cornwall experiences quite a lot of rainfall, especially January/February/March time, and the area directly in front of the retaining wall sometimes looks like a garden pond!   This picture shows the wall and the top of the rock.  It also shows the palm - more about that below. The dogwoods were planted some 5 years ago, and seem to have no problem with their 'feet' being in soggy ground for a large part of the year.  They are very happy, and I have to cut them back each year to stop them growing too tall and obscuring the colourful plants that will be planted on top of the wall, between the row of conifers. The variety is Alba 'Sibirica' and these plants with their eye-catching stems, provide winter colour.  It is said that they should

A good friend, who belongs to a local yacht club, found us this disused boat.   It is positioned next to the river that runs through the garden.  We painted it and try to keep it brim full of seasonal flowers all year round.  At Christmas we decorated it with lights and created 'sails' from the stands of lights.  It looks so nice at night, that we decided to keep them, so it is lit up all year round. Really pleased with the daffodils and hyacinths this year.  The frog, with his heather 'hair' is at the helm.  

Our Magnolia Campbellii in full flower.   Lucky for us that we have different sections of the garden, because this tree completely dominates the west side of the garden.  It is particularly beautiful when in full flower, and people come to photograph it.   It is, however, a very messy tree! It starts with the buds. When they are ready to open, the fur-like jackets that cover the buds are thrown off.  They really do look and feel like fur.  Then there come the petals, which turn the whole garden pink as they fall.  They look lovely, until it rains, then they turn to very slippery slush.  Following the flowers, the leaves develop, and again, when they fall, they completely cover the garden.  The leaves are collected and stored, and make very useful leaf mould. In addition, there are the rather large seed pods, which again are thrown to the ground in large numbers.  When it has finished throwing all it can to the ground, it throws random branches down!  The tree has grown considerably sin

There are a few features that make the garden quite unique, and are therefore worth a mention. We are located less than a mile from the sea at Mount's Bay (Bay an Garrek in Cornish), the largest bay in Cornwall, a large sweeping bay stretching from the Lizard Point to Gwennap Head. The north of the bay is the fairy-tale castle emerging from the water, St Michael's Mount. Our property was the gardener's lodge, situated at the gates marking the start of a long drive leading to the grade II listed Georgian Manor House, built on the site of a castle constructed in the 12th century.  The long, sweeping drive is bordered by the obligatory mature trees.  However, due to the building of a bypass, which transected said sweeping drive, it is now a lane going nowhere . This is rather nice for us because we have unused woodland outside our gates instead of, what would have been, back in the day, a busy drive.  Our pedestrian gate can be seen to the left, under a black arch. A st