Covering just under two acres the garden was started from scratch in 2007. The garden in front of the house has a large area of very wet ground – very difficult to cultivate. Since this is North Cornwall rainfall levels are high, and rain persistent. Being potty about plants it hasn’t put me off!
The house used to be a Vicarage. It was immediately obvious to me that the front door lined up with the church tower, so a double line of hornbeam is being pleached to emphasise the view to the church and break up the area. The collection of double primroses is planted out around the garden; they relish the wet conditions. Pre- First World War herbaceous peonies are a new passion and are rapidly taking over what was originally intended to be vegetable garden. A greenhouse heated in winter contains Nerine sarniensis, species and other pelargonium, while the cold greenhouse has species nerines and narcissus.
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So difficult to predict when peonies are going to flower, and yet people want to book visits a year in advance! This year the peonies flowered three weeks early. They were last this early in 2020 when the weather was very similar. In 2020 there was beautiful sunny hot weather through the Spring (perhaps you remember queuing outside supermarkets in the first lockdown?) and the peonies were very early. This year was a similar hot dry Spring and the peonies were almost as early as they had been in 2020.
The plants flowered well with the Kelway peonies looking especially good. It was a real delight to see some peonies having got themselves settled in flowering well for the first time. This was particularly so with some of the very historic varieties I received from Falkland Palace. I had seen them in situ and when I saw them at Falkland Palace the flowers were fairly late in their flowering season. To see them freshly open and beautiful was very exciting.
Between my National Collection of herbaceous peonies bred by Kelway and Son and my collection of pre-WW1 herbaceous peonies (mostly bred in France) I have about 400 peony plants in the peony beds – a rough estimate! But the temptation is always to have more peonies. I have dug out a small srea of ground to take species peonies – probably with a focus on the daurica. My conditions are too wet to take the delectable Mediterrean species sadly – they need to stay in the greehouse. I am also hankering after collecting varieties of Paeonia officinalis so I can compare them. There used to be a lot of named selections of the officinalis available but although it is obvious that there is variation in the plants in circulation now, the names are lost. It would be impossible to reinstate the names but it would be very interesting to try and make some comparisions.
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