The Summer Gardens

Brockhampton Park is a mellow place to be in summer. The green of the extensive lawns, the shade of mature trees and the flowering of gardens and borders are in harmony with the honey-coloured stone of the house and the texture of its terrace walls. Mallard ducks and Canada Geese raise their young on the lake, the ducklings and goslings forming disciplined formations behind their parents as they cruise the waters. With luck, you may see a chick or two of reclusive moorhens among the foliage, the bright flash of a kingfisher or a stately heron come to fish the waters. Speaking of which, if you are a fisherman, the lake abounds in several species and all leases allow limited fishing.

Peonies are a showy early flower on the east terrace wall, though the blooms do not last very long. The first flowering of the roses is also long over, but in September they show their delicate blooms once again.

For us, a garden is a place of visual pleasure or perhaps a place of reflection, a calming intervention of nature’s beauty in our busy lives, but it should also be a place of shelter or sustenance for small animals, birds, bees, butterflies and the like.

Left: An eclectic display of flowers around the “fountain” wall at the front of the house.

“It has been lovely to watch the colours change over the season, I’ve really enjoyed all the different layers. The bees and the butterflies have also been having a fantastic time”– Resident

As we move into the autumn, the bright flowers fade, yet there still remains the plethora of greens, earth tones and the texture and massing of the plantings that lend their own interest, less showy perhaps, but nevertheless attractive in themselves, especially with a touch of frost.

“To plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow.”

Audrey Hepburn

“We can complain because rose bushes have thorns or we can rejoice because thorn bushes have roses.”

Abraham Lincoln

There is no “The End” to be written, neither can you, like an architect, engrave in stone the day the garden was finished; a painter can frame his picture, a composer notate his coda, but a garden is always on the move.