Skip to main content

Featured

The Garden House (Devon, England)

The destinations are beginning to blur but looking at the tour guide booklet, I see that we are now in Plymouth. Today, we visited two gardens designed by Keith Wiley.  The first is The Garden House , where Wiley worked as Head Gardener for 25 years (from 1978-2003). The 10-acre estate was purchased in the 1940s by former Eton schoolmaster Lionel Fortescue and his wife Katherine. It was formerly home to the  vicars of Buckland Monachronum. The Fortescue's renovated the gardens and ran a market garden business and raised cattle.  The remains of some of the original buildings in the vicarage still stand in the garden and serve as a romantic backdrop in the Walled Garden - I loved the way they had massed ferns together. Just stunning! Surrounding the walled garden and venturing out away from the house are more naturalistic plantings  - Today, the head gardener is Nick Haworth, who was previously head gardener at Greenway , which we visited earlier.  Keith Wiley lef...
2 comments
Read more
Labels

Heirloom Roses (St. Paul, Oregon)

heirloom-roses-1
When we first started our garden in Alabama, we fell in love with antique roses. We ended up with a hundred or so and some of them came from Heirloom Roses in St. Paul, Oregon by mail order. Now that we are living in Washington state, Heirloom Roses, as well as many of the other great plant nurseries, are within driving distance.

Last week, we drove down to St. Paul, about 45 minutes south of Portland, to see the nursery and the display gardens. The Oregon countryside is absolutely gorgeous. It is just one farm after another. Fields of fruit orchards, grapes, hops, conifers, blueberries, and strawberries are just a few of the crops that we passed on our way.

It has been a while since I purchased roses. The first thing I've noticed is that they are much more expensive now. Heirloom's roses are $40 for a gallon pot and $27 for a quart sized pot. Actually, if you are ordering by mail, this is a good deal because they do not charge extra for shipping. I was a bit surprised though that the roses at their retail nursery are the same price! We could not find the roses we wanted at the nursery (they had an open house the previous weekend and had sold out of most of their varieties) but after we got home, I visited their website and they were available. I guess they have a separate inventory for mail-order. Anyway, I ordered a few and actually thought that the roses that arrived later in the mail looked better than the ones they had in their greenhouse. So, if you are shopping at Heirloom, I could recommend mail-order.

On the other hand, if you actually visit, you get to see their beautiful display gardens. Here are a few photos. 
 heirloom-roses-4 heirloom-roses-7 heirloom-roses-10 heirloom-roses-11 heirloom-roses-12 heirloom-roses-8 heirloom-roses-6 heirloom-roses-5 heirloom-roses-2 Text and photos by Phillip Oliver, Dirt Therapy
Email Post
Labels:

Comments

  1. Lisa at GreenbowMay 23, 2016 at 3:50 AM

    When I see roses like this I crave them but I have never had a rose that grew like this. I have given up on them.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hoover BooMay 25, 2016 at 11:25 AM

    $40 for a gallon size. OMG.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment