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The Spring and Winter Garden

A garden to savour and lift your spirits with pockets of spring colour and an abundance of fragrance!

Previously known as the ‘Bridgemere and Women’s Institute Woodland Garden’ it won a Gold Medal at RHS Chelsea in 1993. The garden was originally designed to emphasise the beauty of woodland plants and how a woodland is divided into 3 distinct layers: tree cover, shrubs and ground cover. The garden surrounds a seating area with an usual sculpted stone table and chairs with a basket of fruit.

The garden includes rare varieties of hamamelis and specimen trees. In winter it also blooms with the collection of hellebore. The daphnes and hamamelis greet you with their sweet fragrance and the camellias and azaleas pop with colour. It’s a great excuse to get out in the fresh air and you will find a beautiful fragrant display and lots of inspiration to create your own spring and winter wonderland.

Highlights

Our Head Gardener Bernard recommends you particularly look out for these stunning plants:

The garden is full of fragrant plants during winter and early spring, to provide nectar and pollen for bees and other pollinating insects. Scent is nature’s way of attracting insects. Hamamelis Strawberries and cream is one of Bernard’s favourite scented plants. It’s also quite rare! It has fragrant, bi-coloured flowers with yellow petals, which are tinted with soft red at the tips. Also look out for the Acer griseum tree, with its cinnamon coloured peeling bark, which is particularly attractive. If your looking for something fun and unusual, have a look at Podophyllum ‘Spotty Dotty’ a herbaceous perennial that emerges in the spring and develops chocolate brown spots, hence the name.

Plants to look out for...

Click on a plant to find out more:

Magnolia x loebneri ‘Leonard Messel’

A vigorous medium-sized, deciduous shrub or small tree which can grow up to 4-8 m high. It has narrow oval leaves which are up to 12cm in length and scented, lilac-pink flowers, which are 10cm in width and appear before the leaves.

Podophyllum peltatum

Growing to 45cm high, it bears dramatic, glossy leaves and gently scented flowers, from white to pale pink, then followed by edible fruit.

Viburnum x burkwoodii ‘Mohawk’

A compact, bushy, semi-evergreen deciduous shrub, which can grow to 2.5m in height. It produces strongly fragrant flowers from red buds, which then open white. The glossy green foliage is felted white beneath and turns orange and red in the autumn.

Podophyllum ‘Spotty Dotty’

Common Name: Mayapple
A rhizomatous, herbaceous perennial with large, umbrella-shaped leaves which are spotted with bronze in the spring. This is followed by red, hanging, bell-shaped flowers in early summer.