Warton Gardens, Lancashire; the essence of the National Garden Scheme ethos

Welcome to Wharton, a village situated in North Lancashire nestled into a limestone outcrop in an area of outstanding natural beauty. Hello I'm Geoff and I'm Susan and welcome to our garden. We've opened for the National Gardeners Scheme for probably five years now and we very much like having people visiting our garden and talking to people with similar interests and enthusiasms to ourselves. We have various sections to the garden. This area we're sitting in now is a patio which is quite sheltered and we grow ferns and hostas which are my favourites. Then if we go up through the arch into the main part of the garden we have a long border at the side which gets the sun and it was very narrow to start with but it's widened gradually as we've collected more and more plants. Down at the bottom is my favourite area really it's the fruit and vegetables and we love growing them, we love eating them and we love making jam and all sorts of preserves from them. The trees we put in as well, they are again 13 years old and they're huge now. We have a liquid amber which has had a very nice autumn colour, which is called a wedding cake tree yes and it's beautiful. And then the metasequoia which is a redwood isn't it, a giant redwood, dawn redwood that's right. We come down now to the area down here which has the shed and watering cans and one for each of our grandchildren. They just love watering when they're here. It'll be lovely to welcome them back when the lockdown is finally over. And then we have the area down here where we have all the plants that we raise, these are extra to our needs and we sell those when we open for the NGS and it's usually the first port of call for all our visitors. My garden at 107 is a cutting garden and it's my business. I started this up a couple of years ago and I made eight beds all one meter by four meters long. I cut the flowers and I arranged them for weddings and bouquets and funerals and anything else. But my whole slant is that they're all British and seasonal flowers and that's what I love and that's my whole ethos for my business. I've only been doing this for a couple of years and I've learnt an awful lot and it's been such fun and I love doing it. It's become a real passion. I'm very lucky really. I came to gardening from a very young age. My late father was the most fantastic gardener and it's really rubbed off on me. Gardens evoke memories and this lemon balm reminds me of Aunty Polly, my great aunt, and I would go and cut her lawn as a child and this seat is Aunty Polly's seat so it has a special place in this garden. We've been sending each other messages on Whatsapp and it's been like nature notes so when we've spotted a moth or a bird or a flower that's unusual we're almost competing with each other over it but it's been fabulous. It's really helped to keep in touch with them. Briar Cottage is a small garden packed with detail. A perfect place to enjoy the afternoon sun. Jo and Richard have worked really hard on this garden. It's in a limestone outcrop and they had to dig down deep and build up the beds in order to grow things. There are spalliard pear and apple trees, cordon soft fruit and vegetable beds. There's always something to look at. It's a really interesting garden and Richard and Jo have worked really hard to make it so beautiful. It's a delight to see. Well it's a wonderful place to come. Normally we can hear children playing and during the lockdown this has been my main place that I come. Occasionally see one or two people and we can at least have an interaction at a safe distance on our own individual plots. I like growing as much as we can eat a whole variety of stuff. They're climbing climbing One thing we've done slightly differently this year was that we had a plot which wasn't taken in the spring. Then we did have someone who wanted to join us so we let them have half the plot and we've used the other half to plant any spare veg that we've got with the idea that any produce that comes can go to food banks or to the village support organisation. It's working quite well I think. I'm planting a few anti-rinans here. The aim of this plot really is to try and grow anything that will appeal to pollinating insects, bees in particular. We're all quite concerned about wildlife on the allotments so we're just trying to diversify and plant as many different species of flowers as we can to try and help the bees and help the wildlife generally.