Spring arrives early

Gold Hill the quaint cobbled street in the Dorset town of Shaftesbury

Visit Stonehenge and Salisbury on the same day tour

Visit Salisbury Cathedral and Stonehenge on the same tour day

Visit The Roman Baths on your tour of Bath and the Southern Cotswolds

Site designed and built by Paul & Susy Wilson

Updated: 21 March 2008

SPRING ARRIVES EARLY IN ENGLAND

This morning we awoke to gentle English rainfall - something that we have not seen since early in March. Can this be England? The country renowned for its rain!! We have had a very warm Spring with continuous blue days and temperatures into the 70's. All the plants in garden are racing to come into leaf, flower or whatever, the high temperatures making it feel as though summer has already arrived. The apple blossom is out and the cherry blossom is falling like confetti - this is the time when we hope that the frosts will stay away so that the apple crop will be good in the Autumn.

Paul and I have been very busy in the garden - hopefully returning guests will see the difference! More of our weed patches have been erased and the pergola that blew down in a winter gale has been replaced with something much grander! We have planted climbing roses (The New Dawn) and ramblers Felicite Perpetue and Adelaide D'Orleans, plus passion flower to go with the existing Solanum and honeysuckles. We have planted catmint (Nepeta x faassenii) for cover on the ground. There are still a few spaces but we will fill those with annuals for this year.

The greenhouse is full (in fact, overfull!) with a wide variety of plants both ornamental and culinary. We start lots of things like salads and beans indoors and plant them out in May when we judge the risk of frost to be over. Paul has also installed an irrigation system for the vegetable garden. In the past we have watered manually but the new 'leaky pipe' system will allow us to water much more efficiently and more often.

The English countryside is looking beautiful. This is undoubtedly my favourite time of the year. Even when I was a child I used to love the time when the hedgerows came into leaf and would wonder however we got through the winter without them!

Hedges have been used in England as field boundaries for centuries but the majority of what we see today was planted during the Enclosures period in the 18th and 19th centuries. This was a time of great change and hardship in rural England when common land was 'enclosed' and the peasantry lost their livelihoods, leaving the country for work in the industrial towns. It is thought that there are probably 500,000 miles of hedges in England and you would not imagine that a landscape feature of such beauty could be testament to times of such upheaval in the countryside. The predominant hedgerow species in our part of England are blackthorn, hawthorn, field maple, hazel and dog rose. The hawthorn is about to flower, always creating a spectacular display with its white clusters of flowers and bright green foliage. The dog roses will follow on in May by which time the vibrant colours of Spring will have subsided.

Whatever your vacation plans this year, we hope that you are enjoying the turning of the season as much as we are at Church House in lovely Dorset.

With all best wishes

Susy, Paul and Lucy