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The gardening year at Powis Castle ... “roughly speaking”
After Christmas: “We usually get on to more project work. So, into the woodland, the banks around the garden, brambles, pruning, regenerating overgrown shrubs. Any tree work because, if we’re cutting, we want to do it when the visitors are not around.”
“All the plants in the garden are in the nursery so, at this time of year, the team will start sowing the seeds. The annuals we will add to the border; we probably have 2,500- 3,000 annuals.”
February: “The lads go and collect pea sticks. Powis Estates own some parkland, so they go and cut hazel trees. We use hazel in the borders to support plants. It doesn’t show up like bamboo canes.”
March: “Mulching, feeding, fertilising and forking through. Mulching the borders is done on a cycle, so not every border every year. ”
“There might be some splitting and dividing to regenerate the plants. Any leftovers will go down to the nursery and be potted up. All the plant sales come directly through the garden. So, if you buy a plant, it’s grown from a plant on site, by the staff on site - a living souvenir.”
“About six weeks of pea sticking for supporting the plants. The thing with staking, it doesn’t sound much, but the reason we spend six weeks is because it’s a terraced garden, you can look down over the top of the borders, and then drop down and
you can walk alongside. You’ve got different views. A lot of the plants are really tall in the borders and, if you get heavy rain, it flattens them. So, if we support them well, we don’t tend to get the damage.”
“Weeding, because, when our borders come up, there’s hardly any room to get in there because it's so full of plants.”
“Then the mowing starts and is carried out every week.”
April: “Sowing and potting up. We probably put about thirty containers out on the balustrading and the steps. They’re tender perennials again; things like fuschias and salvias.”
May: “All the tropical effects are planted out when the frost has gone. Because we grow things like Abutilons big in the nursery, they go out big, so you could come in on a Saturday and the border is empty and, by the following Friday people would think it has been there forever. It just gets fuller and fuller and flowers away. The containers get put out, and everything is planted up after the frost has gone. Then onto the nursery, where there is always propagation, dividing, potting up, plants for sale, plants for the garden, and looking after the stock that’s there.”
June: “Two people cut the box hedges for about a month. We’ve got some low ones, we’ve got some high.”
PC FEBRUARY/MARCH 2016 I 99
Mid July: “We start cutting the wildflower banks in the garden from here onwards.
August: “The main yew hedge cutting begins. There’s two staff assigned to the formal hedgecutting, where they put lines out to get it lovely and crisp. Then one person in the cherry picker basket cutting the big hedges.”
“Formative pruning of the apple trees.”
November: Rescuing tender perennials: “When the cold weather comes, they’re going to die, aren’t they? So, if we’ve got back-ups in the nursery and the plant is sacrificial, then we let them out. But some we’ve got to rescue because we need them the following year.”
“The archway in the formal garden has a grapevine, which is pruned before Christmas, so it doesn’t bleed so much. Then a couple of prunes throughout the year just to keep the shape.”
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