Category: Historic Garden Maintenance
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Pruning an Established Apple Espalier
Trained fruit trees, probably one of a gardeners favourite jobs. These old apple espaliers perfectly illustrate the techniques and pitfalls when maintaining trained fruit trees, whether espaliers, cordons or whatever shape takes your fancy. Planted in the late 1890’s these trained fruit trees at Barrow Court in North Somerest were once regarded as one…
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Maintaining a Victorian Shrubbery
Edwards Garden Services has been working on the restoration and maintenance of this Grade II registered Victorian shrubbery since 2011. From the intial work focusing on restoration – the grove was a dense thicket, impenetrable and dark, the individual specimens lost on the undergrowth, work is slowly changing to a balance of routine maintenance. Variously…
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Tales from the Riverbank
Immortalised in poetry, the River Boyd runs for some 7 miles between Dodington and the River Avon at Bitton, it’s ‘watery sway washing the cliffs of Doynton and Wick’. The Boyd’s industrial heritage is now part of its natural history; the wiers, sluices, mill races part of the landscape inhabited by crayfish, mink, owls and…
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Renovating a 1937 Water Lily Canal
An 18th century garden in Abbots Leigh, North Somerset. Within this older garden, and in the shadow of a 250 year old Cedar tree is a garden within a garden – a late Arts & Crafts enclosure, dating from 1937, defined by a central linear water feature. Some 20m in length, 1.5m wide, 1m deep…
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Maintaining a Box parterre
Trimming box in the depths of winter? Not exactly by the book (crimes against horticulture I hear people shout). Not only the timing, we also use machines to do the trimming! The reason – box blight and half a kilometre of hedging. We (Jim and myself) decided to shift to winter cutting some years ago…
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Garden & Estate Management
Edwards Garden Services has many years experience managing and maintaining gardens, from historic registered parks and gardens of national significance to urban courtyards in the heart of the city of Bristol. Garden Management Plans Tailored annual budgets Conservation Management Plans Garden survey & assessment An understanding of the history of the garden, from its original …
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Restoring a Victorian Shrubbery
The Grade II registered garden at Barrow Court just 6 miles south of Bristol is one of the finest examples of the revival of a formal style of gardening that marked the progress of garden design in the 19th century. The Victorian search for a historical legitimacy, a true Englishness, was realised at Barrow Court…