http://www.dorsetwalledgarden.co.uk/

Dorset Walled Garden, Upper Sydling House, Dorchester (2025)

08/03/2025

Introducing Lucinda on International Women's Day!

We are delighted to have Lucinda as our principle gardener here now (Ali sadly left us in September to have her baby Wilf). Lucinda has been working alongside Ali for 3 years and has had the garden in her care for the last 6 months. I am grateful to her for her courage (only just short of 400 roses to prune!) and her energy coupled with enthusiasm, especially so in a year where I have chosen to experiment with a few new ideas!

I found Lucinda sitting, pondering the garden in the late afternoon sun several months ago and felt it made a lovely shot.

Lucinda is helped by Denise who is new to the garden and I am very sorry not to have a photograph of Denise to add to this post on International Women's Day! Denise comes one day a week and brings a cheerful disposition with her which we are very grateful for!

Happy International Women's Day!

20/02/2025

Thinking ahead to rose-filled days in the garden. Tuesday’s sunny weather gave us a hint that it might just happen…today is challenging that thinking!

This beautiful photograph was taken by in June 2023

of an

📷

18/01/2025

It was a lovely surprise to see our garden courses featured over a few pages in this week’s To share a feature with such well-known horticultural names as and , amongst others, made us very proud of what we have been working at here at Dorset Walled Garden.

Huge thanks go to , Garden Editor of who made this article possible and for sending two such lovely people as to feature our courses so generously and to take such great photographs of in our garden on a particularly drab and grey day!

This issue of came out on Wednesday, 15th January, so don’t delay to get your copy (it is a weekly magazine!)

We are running our Rose Pruning Day on Monday and very much looking forward to meeting another gorgeous bunch of fellow rose pruners! This will soon be followed by our Natural Structures and Staking course later this month.

12/01/2025

We were very honoured to be listed alongside so many very established and well-known centres of learning and excellence (see below) in The Telegraph today, for our courses. Our thanks goes out to and all the staff at The Telegraph involved in putting this feature together.

Our Planting Design course is new to our collection of useful and informative gardening courses held here in Dorset.
This course is being held over three separate days, in March, May and finishing in June when the garden here is at its best. Details are on our website - link in bio.

There are only 2 spaces left, so if you are interested in working on your planting schemes with , it would be wise not to delay booking your place on the Planting Design course.

In addition to this and for those who are not familiar with what we offer here, we also hold Rose Pruning courses, Scented Pelargoniums courses, Natural Structures and Stakes courses, aswell as a comprehensive gardening course ('Gardening through the Seasons' course) held over 6 sessions through the gardening year. Our Instagram and website gallery of photos shows examples of what a course at Dorset Walled Garden is like and what you might be able to expect from attending a course here.

Other courses mentioned were, for example:
...amongst others

borders

03/01/2025

A very happy morning spent together with Frances of discussing our mutual love of roses.
I am very much hoping to see Frances's beautiful collection of old roses again this summer. Always a treat and an utterly stunning garden to visit.

Happy New Year to all our followers and thank you for all your support on Instagram, visiting the garden and attending our courses. We wish you all a very happy and productive year in your garden!

01/12/2024

Honoured to be one of (Garden Editor of House &Garden magazine) chosen
10 Dream Gardens in her recent post. This photograph was taken when Clare came with to photograph the garden for her feature on the garden in the July 2024 issue of

(For some reason I couldn't repost it fully, hence the screenshot!)

14/08/2024

Starting to think about editing the borders and picking out areas or plants that need changing round, lifted and divided etc. Quite a few photos of the garden on my iPad have lots of scribbles, arrows and notes on them, at this time of year! But it seems a shame to scribble on this photograph, taken by in June, when he came to photograph the roses for
I find it impossible to capture the borders, hence them rarely appearing on my feed. Thank you for this lovely photograph, Jonathon!

A lot of delphiniums were lost this year due to all the wet in our borders, but this purple (or would you say blue?!) delphinium survived, but only just, with only one spike from three plants! The slug population, like for everyone else this year, was unprecedented. I am hoping for a cold, dry winter ahead and I am sure you are too.

11/03/2024

NB! Our Events are now available to book on our website and just to briefly summarise:

We have a very special 'Evening amongst the Roses' with Michael Marriott, who was Head Rosarian at David Austin for 35 years, in June, at prime roses time. Numbers will be limited so as to benefit from this informative, guided tour of the many roses here and all proceeds will go to the local charity, 'The Talk about Trust'. Entry by ticket only and bookable via the link in bio.

We now have dates for the next 'Gardening through the Seasons' course, a 5 day course (held between Sept 2024 and June 2025) led by Troy Scott Smith, Head Gardener at Sissinghurst NT, details of which are now on the website, link in bio. (This is the perfect course to become more hands on with planning, managing and/or seeing to all aspects of the garden. It has enabled current attendees of the course to be more confident, knowledgeable and capable in their own garden - or anyone else's for that matter! The practical demonstrations and lectures are both excellent.

We are excited to be launching a Planting Design course for the first time, also led by Troy Scott Smith, it will be held here over 3 days, in March, May and June 2025.

Our popular Scented Pelargoniums Day has only one space left! See link in bio.

Our regular Rose Pruning Workshop, where you are also given the chance to practise what you have learnt, is available to book for January 2025, prime rose pruning time, and you will no doubt be ordering more roses after Troy's very inspiring lecture!

roses

01/01/2024

We are excited for 2024! And we wish you all a very happy and healthy year ahead.

This year we shall be particularly focused on helping a local charity by opening the garden on a few days during the year, aswell as running some of our regular (and some new) courses.

We very much hope to meet you at some point during the year, but in the meantime, we'd like to thank you so very much for all your support and kind comments throughout the year.

01/12/2023

Our Christmas wreath workshops are in full swing now, starting today with a bespoke workshop for charity. It was a delightful group who came, lots of nervous giggles which actually produced some stunning wreaths...see stories for more pics!
We have two places left on our wreathmakjng workshop on 5th December, or we can take orders for wreaths or Christmas table arrangements - please DM me for details

26/09/2023

The September Garden.
A few roses, aster, penstemon, aconite, echinops, euphorbia, salvia, cleome, antirrhinum, delphinium, alc.cannabina, phlox, scabious and dahlias are all flowering in the walled garden. The evening I took this (just over a week ago), the light was low and the garden a little bit wild - but all the early staking has meant these plants have mostly withstood the incessant rain!

22/09/2023

The kitchen garden.
With a few new accessories, we have been much more successful in the wildlife battle!
However we have been very generous, allowing an unauthorised leveret to grow into a fully grown hare this season! We have learnt that flat leaf parsley is particularly tasty to a hare - and rabbits for that matter!

07/09/2023

August highlights in the garden

1. Euphorbia seguieriana - seen in a friend’s garden and planted in the walled garden last year - with Perovskia Blue Spire
2. Sanguisorba Blackthorn - suggested to me by , a new addition to the borders
3. Sweet peas still going strong at the end of August, in the walled garden
4. A happy accident! Fennel intertwined with self-seeded althaea cannabina in the kitchen garden
5. Alcathaea suffrutescens Parkallee - a rust resistant variety
6. Dahlia from nursery - I have a thing with raspberry ripple flowers
7. Delphiniums - returned even stronger in August having been planted in the borders and the cutting beds this Spring
8. Sedum Autumn Joy - a favourite for its excellent growth habit: stands tall and fresh for months
9. Self-seeded hollyhock, in a unique colour
10. Dahlia collection - in the process of rebuilding our collection following a disastrous and lengthy flooding last winter

17/08/2023

We have been very quiet but busy recently and looking forward to holding our first 5 day course, ‘Gardening through the Seasons’, led by Troy Scott Smith, Head Gardener of Sissinghurst, starting in September.

I am very guilty of thinking ahead to the next season, once the high point in the garden has passed…but the garden does then turn a corner and has more to give (in some areas more than others), which then totally throws my editing thoughts and confusing diagrams into flux! During the course, Troy will be discussing elements of border editing, so I am feeling quite nervous of what he will be showing the course attendants as questionable planting combinations! It would be great if we could have moved things around before the first course day, but that would defeat the object of the course!

We look forward to seeing all those who have signed up for the course, in September!

13/07/2023

Our dogs have always been good company in the garden, but sadly we lost two dogs this year, one to old age and one to advanced cancer. We miss them enormously.
Our only remaining dog, Poppy (in 1st picture, she is thedaughter of Lottie in 3rd picture), is a slightly reluctant gardener, unless she can find the odd carrot in a live trap! The other way she can be persuaded to garden with me is if I close all
exit gates - I hope I can soon convert her and find she stays out with me of her own will!

22/06/2023

Rosa Felicite Parmentier.

I fell for this rose whilst visiting a few years ago. It was so stunning, so I decided to trial it in the rose cutting beds. It has been slow-ish to grow here and this is the first year it is producing lots of flowers.

It reminds me of (a pale pink version of) Mme Hardy - absolutely beautiful!

20/06/2023

Alastair and I spent a gloriously balmy evening in the Bannermans’ garden last night, filled with delicious scent and beautiful roses amongst so many other gorgeous plants and features. They have been busy!

It was a very fitting end to the day, as we held our ‘Roses Day’ here, yesterday. Along with my mother-in-law’s rose collection, (she even carried bunches of her rambling roses out to us in Asia!), the Bannermans’ collection of roses has inspired us hugely over the years, as have the wonderful old roses at Sissinghurst.

Thank you and for a great evening at your new home, which doesn’t feel new at all! We so enjoyed the evening.

14/06/2023

Michael Marriott, ex-Head Rosarian at David Austin for 30+ years, seen here leading a garden tour, always has plenty of wisdom to share. We learnt more about our roses, including the identification of a mystery rambler!

We have been busy with garden tours so far in June - pictures below show two of our six events just this week: and aswell as in collaboration with ’s tour of the South West.

For the Sisley Garden Tour, we were honoured to be amongst such gardens as , ,
Gasper Cottage and Highbridge House. This tour was organised in collaboration with
The English Garden Magazine. We held a floral demonstration after the garden tour, using cut flowers from the cutting garden, a huge success! Thank you to our workshops teacher, Randal!

June continues to be very busy with courses and tours,
all so worthwhile as we are collecting for Bowel Cancer UK to mark and celebrate the ‘all clear’ a close family member has reached, for eight years now, which is a significant milestone. A huge thank you, we hope we can support you well this year to continue all your amazing research, work and developments.

Dorset Walled Garden

08/03/2025

20/02/2025

18/01/2025

12/01/2025

03/01/2025

01/12/2024

14/08/2024

11/03/2024

01/01/2024

01/12/2023

26/09/2023

22/09/2023

07/09/2023

17/08/2023

13/07/2023

22/06/2023

20/06/2023

14/06/2023

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