gardening at home with sarah | walk around perch hill
Join Sarah on a beautiful spring morning for a tour of her favourite spots around Perch Hill.
It’s the most beautiful morning this morning, in this strange time without a single airplane with its trail in the sky, and there’s nowhere better to be in spring than in a garden if you’ve got one, and you’ve got things like the euphorbias are coming into flower, the viburnum has literally just opened in the last couple of days, and this lovely tulip called ‘Lasergame’, and this is one of my real favourite Narcissi, which is called ‘Avalanche’, and it flowers from very early, it’s one of the first to come into the garden, sometimes in January, this year in February, and it goes on right till the end of March, and it’s deliciously scented with these long stems, so it’s perfect for a vase, with a smell of sort of stephanotis. We started planting narcissus down our drive as soon as we came here and they’ve got really well established now, but I’m going to do a separate film about those.
This is the cutting garden which is the real heart of the place as it’s the first garden that I made when I came here, and it’s split into perennials and annuals, but I’ll show you. And this is a lovely narcissus which we pick a lot, called ‘Trevithian’ which comes from Cornwall, and then this is the most beautiful hyacinth which is so delicate called ‘Anastasia’, which is like a scented bluebell. And then all the way down the main path here we’ve got a lovely pure white narcissus called ‘Thalia’, and then Anemone coronarias are coming here, they last about 2 weeks in a vase, and then here we’ve got Narcissus ‘Avalanche’ again which I described earlier, and some hyacinths that we’re trialling at the top there, and then in here I’m going to show you the polyanthus.
So the last thing I want to show you this morning is the polyanthus trial, and it’s been an absolute triumph because the thing that we’ve always done here is have our tulips with wallflowers, but we really wanted to extend that out, and that’s why we’ve got in all these different bands the different polyanthus, and this without doubt has been THE most incredible thing. I started picking it for my birthday at the beginning of February -that’s our lovely gold laced Poland cockerel – and it’s called ‘Stella Champagne’, and it’s just the most beautiful, beautiful thing, and just as Gertrude Jekyll picked polyanthus, we’ve been picking these because they’re on long stems, so it’s a good, very good picking tradition.
