Walled Garden Volunteers' Blog October 2025
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As anyone with an apple tree will tell you, there is fruit in abundance this year! This autumn I think is the first time, since they were planted, that we can recognise the apples on our orchard trees at a glance. For example, we know our Cambridge Queening from our Arlingham Schoolboy, and Jenny Lind from the Gloucester Underleaf - though the Russets are still a bit confusing and Lodgemore Non Pareil (the ‘Stroud Apple), has been a great disappointment with small, gnarly, pocked fruits. And we’ve had our first quinces, too.
On a Monday morning for the past four weeks, we’ve begun the day by gathering apples. They’ve made a colourful display and we are so pleased that visitors are trying a taste of some of these old apple varieties. As for the Bramley Seedlings…please keep taking them away (for a donation to the garden if you can) to make apple juice, stewed apple to freeze, apple cake, apple pies, apple chutney….
The crabapple trees also are laden. Crabapple jelly would be nice, but the fruit is already past its best, so we shall leave much of that harvest for the garden birds; and there is so much else to do in the Walled Garden at present.
We coasted through the roasting Summer, concentrating on keeping our plants alive, and trying to stay cool ourselves; but now we discover that in the Garden the plants were happily casting seeds! And even the Paulownia tree has had a new burst of energy, growing fresh leaves on a bough we thought was dead!
The Briza ‘quaking grass’ once our favourite with its little nodding heads, has lined up all along the edge of the Med border in a mass of little green shoots – too many! So, as with our gardener (Carroll’s!) policy on the Taming of Miss Willmott (Eryngium Giganteum), it’s out with (most of) them!
As a break from Briza weeding, Caroline did a grand job on the Libertia, shown off in the first picture below, with a mulch of our wonderful dark, rich compost. Geoff has just ‘decanted’ the compost bay - excellent results as you can see below.
Meanwhile, in the veg. area (pictured above), ‘the Helens’ have produced a fine crop from the raised beds, and are now sowing chard, garlic, leeks, and broccoli. Our apricot trees are espaliered and tidied, too, and so we are starting to tick a few jobs off the list.
Aided by Margret and Cheryl, Nicola has been snipping at the topiary. Thanks to Nicola’s diligence, the Box is healthy: (fingers crossed); we’ve replaced just a few of the original plants with either Yew, Osmanthus, Ilex Crenata or Lonicera. Now, the Box Cloud is starting to join together, and shapes like a cockerel, and maybe a hen and chicks, and a nest, are emerging alongside more abstract pieces.
We’ve also re-seeded the lawn, after it was scorched in the Summer and then reduced to mud during the Blacksmithing event when rain hammered down. In just seven days the new grass is already up; the lawn will soon be green again, though at present is out of bounds while it grows.
Finally, colour – it is glorious this autumn. The Walled Garden is in its ‘almost-out-of-control-wildness stage’, with colour everywhere.
Soon there will be much to be done to prepare the Garden for winter, but for now, just come and enjoy it all. It costs nothing and does all of us good!
