Visiting the garden at Sizergh

Winter in the garden

With new Head Gardener Bertie in post, the team are looking forward to sharing and developing new ideas for the year ahead. They’ll be carrying out their usual winter maintenance tasks...

• Pruning and training roses and other shrubs to maintain their shape, encourage new growth and continued flowering
• Pruning Sizergh’s heritage apple collection to maintain its health and productivity
• Planning out the Kitchen Garden for a productive season
• Mulching beds and borders with the compost they’ve made to replenish nutrients, suppress weeds and conserve moisture levels

The curious twisted shapes of the 100-year-old Acers can be admired in the Rock Garden along with Hellebores.The winter walk and wooded Knoll will come alive with snowdrops and aconites in the early part of the year, closely followed by early flowering shrubs such as Daphne and Winter Honeysuckle.

The Rock Garden

The Rock Garden was created in the early 20th century and originally planted with acers, conifers and herbaceous perennials. Later on, the garden was further developed and more ferns added. In fact, the garden is home to four national collections of ferns, which can be found in the Stumpery, Rock Garden, Kitchen Garden and orchard.

We recommend viewing the Rock Garden from the bench under the Scots Pine with a cup of coffee. This ancient giant will keep you dry during a light shower or shaded from the sun on a hot day. The mature acers, with their delicately shaped leaves, are another highlight, with their magnificent purple foliage in spring and summer which turns to fiery red and orange in autumn.

The Stumpery

The Stumpery opened in 2016 and every spring more than a dozen varieties of miniature daffodils complement the fresh green unfurling fronds of the ferns.

The orchard

You'll find over 65 varieties of apple tree in the orchard, including many northern varieties. Harvesting begins in August with early varieties, and continues until the end of October. The harvest is used in the café or offered to visitors to take home in exchange for a small donation. Surplus fruit and vegetables are donated to Waste into Wellbeing, a local charity that provides meals for the community. Experience the cloud like blossom in spring, the carpet of wild meadow under the trees in summer, and ripe fruit in early autumn.

Fresh produce in the Kitchen Garden

The ethos of self-sufficiency has always been important to the Strickland family and continues to be so to this day. The combinations of vegetables and flowers are not only productive, but also beautiful, culminating in a colourful display. Just as the Stricklands would have grown fruit and vegetables to be used in their kitchen, today’s produce is supplied directly to the café on a daily basis.

Many of the vegetables and flowers you see in the Kitchen Garden started life in the greenhouse; there’s always a variety of seedlings in there at any one time.