Sunday 23rd  March

Thriplow Daffodil weekend 

(near Royston)

The whole village is open and car free for 2 days, full of stalls, rides and tasty treats. Hundreds of varieties of daffodils  will be on display, along with dog agility shows, Morris dancing, steam engines, classic cars, traditional craft displays, live music, open gardens, street food and beer tents.

Depart 50 Weston Way  9.30 am

(just past Ridgeway, church end)

(please note new departure point)

Leave Thriplow 4.00 pm

ETA Home 5.20 pm

WFGS Members - £26  

 WFGS non  members - £28

Tickets available January and February, 

final date for tickets is on 18th February, at the meeting.

Saturday May 17th

Free RHS Trip 

Entry to RHS Garden free, just coach to pay for

£22 WFGS

£24 Non WFGS

(same as last year!!)

Depart 50 Weston Way  9.00 am

(just past Ridgeway, church end)

(please note new departure point)

Tickets available March and April

Tuesday June 24th

Evening Visit to Cramden Nursery, Kingsthorpe

A self Drive visit with limited numbers

Tickets available April and May

Wednesday July 16th

Bourton House Garden and Sezincote House and Garden, Gloucestershire 

Tickets available May and June

8.30 Leave 50 Weston Way (please note new departure point)
10.30 Arrive Bourton House Garden
12.45 Leave Bourton House
1.00 Arrive Sezincote
2.00 pm and 2.30 pm House Tours
4.30 Leave Sezincote

AS we will be leaving Bourton House Garden at lunchtime it is worth noting that you are not allowed to take your own food and drink in to the gardens but that Sezincote welcomes you to picnic in the grounds. Bourton House does light lunches as well as tea and cakes but Sezincote does not do lunches!

See details of both venues below or look up their websites to see pictures of these two beautiful venues.

Bourton House Garden
Award-winning 3-acre garden surrounding an 18th century Manor House and Grade I listed 16th century Tithe Barn. Bourton House Garden features luxuriant terraces and wide herbaceous borders with stunning plant, texture and colour combinations. Features include a topiary walk, a White Garden and several spring-fed water features including a raised basket pond from the Great Exhibition of 1851. You will also find a Shade House, colourful borders with unusual tender perennials and many creatively planted pots. A raised 18th century walk provides an enticing visual link to the Cotswold landscape beyond. Visitors to the garden are also invited to enjoy the walk in our seven-acre field (opened to the public in 2013) which meanders through groups of specimen trees planted in 1994/95. Beautiful to visit throughout the seasons, Bourton House Garden presents an especially magnificent late summer flourish when many gardens run their course.
Refreshments
The Cafe is fully open from May until the end of September 10.30am-4.30pm (last orders 4pm) selling hot and cold drinks, light lunches and delicious cakes. In April and October we will be running a “Pop-Up” cafe serving hot and cold drinks and a selection of homemade cakes, Please note that the cafe may close early during spells of bad weather.
Tables and chairs will be provided in the Orchard and in the Tithe Barn.
Please do not take food or drink into the Garden.

Sezincote House and Gardens

An Indian Mansion
After winding through the mighty oaks that line the long drive of this Gloucestershire garden on the edge of the Cotswolds, you see a weathered-copper onion dome straight out of India. The south front, complete with curving orangery, unfurls above a Repton landscape that has remained unchanged since the mid-19th century. The garden is blessed by a series of spring-fed pools, connected by gurgling water which eventually tumbles into the Island Pool in the valley bottom, before joining the River Evenlode below.
The house was the whim of Colonel John Cockerell, grandson of the diarist Samuel Pepys, who returned to England having amassed a fortune in the East India Company. John died in 1798, three years after his return, and the estate passed to his youngest brother Charles, who had also worked for the company. He commissioned his brother Samuel, an architect, to design and build an Indian house in the Mogul style of Rajasthan, complete with minarets, peacock-tail windows, jali-work railings and pavilions.
Work began on Sezincote in 1805 and was substantially complete by 1807. Once completed, Sezincote dazzled all who came. When the Prince Regent visited in 1807, an event commemorated in a Daniell painting owned by the family, he was so impressed that he went on to change his plans for the Royal Pavilion in Brighton. Designed by John Nash, it echoed the exotic Indian style he had admired at Sezincote.
The house was hugely restored after the 2nd World War and it is thought that Sezincote is the only Mughal building surviving in Western Europe.
Gardens
The garden includes the canals and Irish yews in the South Garden, evocative of Moghul paradise gardens, a curving conservatory, home to many tender climbing plants, and little pavilion also in Indian style, and all the exceptionally fine planting of the water garden, where many rare plants can be seen.
Streams and pools are lined with great clumps of bog-loving plants and the stream is crossed by an Indian bridge adorned with Brahmin bulls. Ornaments include a temple to Surya the sun god, and a snake coiled around a column in the Snake Pond.
Refreshments
The Orangery Tearoom is located in the garden just past the main house. It serves tea, coffee and cake including gluten free options, but not lunch. The Tearoom has a capacity for up to 40 people at any one time.
You are welcome to picnic in the gardens. We don’t have a dedicated picnic area, but there are lots of seats throughout the garden. . We do not provide bins, so we ask all our visitors to take any rubbish away with them.

 Saturday September afternoon visit to a local garden (tba)

Breezy Knees Garden, York

If you were at the May meeting where Don Witton gave his excellent and amusing presentation on ‘Once Seen Never Forgotten’,  you too may have been interested in hearing about Breezy Knees Garden near York.

We happened to be spending a few days in Flamborough, Yorkshire the following week and by altering our route home only slightly maaged to fit in a visit to this fascinating garden.

Quirky is the word which comes immediatley to mind, interesting and unusual also fit the bill. We spent several hours there and it was nowhere near enough, we had to rush to get our delicious cream tea in before closing time. (The café, visited several times during our time there) was excellent and unlike so many places stayed open almost until the gardens closed. There was a superb nursery too, for once selling many of the plants we saw around the gardens instead of the same as every Garden Centre in the country and prices weren’t too expensive either!

It was quite a long walk along ‘The Rabbit Path’ to the garden proper and they do try to keep the rabbits out! A splendid gate allowed you in to start on a circuit of the garden rooms, which seemed to get bigger and bigger as we went on. They had some lovely names such as Stonehedge, a version of Stonehenge made up of pillars of clipped beech, and plenty big enough to lose yourself in. A June Garden a May Garden, a September Garden, Rock Garden, Pond and Shade Garden, Cottage Garden and many more, 20 in all. There was a garden with fountains in which started up every 4 minutes and performed for 2 minutes with different patterns and comfortable seats to sit and watch from too.

There was a 15 foot sculpture of a pair of wellington boots in one garden and a matching 15 foot trowel in another. Lots of metal sculptures and other interesting features all around.

One place I was determined to see before we left was ‘The Rogues Gallery’, I could not imagine for the life of me what would be in there. It turned out to be an area planted up with all those thugs of plants you planted because they looked so nice but then wished you hadn’t because they take over your garden, we have quite a few of those ourselves! Their sign read’ Rogues Gallery, so called because all the plants here, whilst attractive, are very invasive and if planted in normal borders would soon swampeverything around them. However, hopefully here they will meet their match – their neighbours may be even bigger thugs than they are!’ Love it! We must go back and see who wins.

The garden was started on arable farmland in 1999 and was planted first with a framework of trees, hedges and shrubathamanta turbiths and then as those began to provide some shelter work began on the borders and garden rooms and is still ongoing. It is called Breezy Knees because it is very exposed “and if you stood there in January, you wouldn’t ask why it was called that!” It is only open from May through to September for that reason. It is one of only a handful of British gardens with a current 5 star Trip Advisor rating and is situated on the eastern outskirts of York, some 5 miles from the city centre.

Thank you Don, for enthusing about it in your talk, and introducing it to us, a place well worth a visit by anyone. But leave plenty of time!!

Sue and Trevor Wray

Autumn Trip to Wisley

Despite starting our Autumn trip to Wisley in the pouring rain, playing speedboats on the motorways and having to take a long detour because Junction 10 on the M25 was closed we had a lovely day out in mostly warm, glorious sunshine.

It was their Taste of Autumn festival with some lovely displays of Autumn fruits and colours near the entrance and then the totally natural glory of Autumn leaves and late flowering plants to feast our eyes in the rest of the garden.

I don't think anyone managed to visit more than a small part of the gardens in the 4 1/2 hours we finally spent there but all voted it a wonderful day out. Several of us enjoyed looking around the wonderful, not so very old, house which used to be the Old Laboratory and now open to the public for the first time, and a few even found time to visit the wonderful Library in the Hilltop building.

All in all a very good day out for our free entry visit this year because we are affiliated as a society to the RHS. Back to Hyde Hall next year as we have found the other three RHS gardens at Rosemoor, Harlow Carr and Bridgewater have proved too far to travel comfortably in one day.

Village Show 2024

Saturday 31^st August

Well we have another successful Village Show under our belts and as organiser I am very grateful to the superb committee who worked so hard again this year. They were enthusiastic, committed and very hard working, it makes all the difference to the day.

We had over 100 entrants and about 300 individual entries, which gave us plenty to look at and stir interest. We are always ready for more and it would be lovely to have all classes with at least one entry, some had none, and it seems much more gratifying being first out of three or more than first out of one!

Fruit and vegetables were well supported this year as were the plants, flowers and handicrafts, we could  still do with more baking and preserves entries and lots more children’s entries, both of which had fewer entries this year. Those children who did enter were very proud of their rosettes and showing off their skills as well as pleased with the small gift they were given just for entering!

The one category that was extremely well supported was the photography section, which had over 40 entries, making it a hard job for the judge this year!

Although this is intended as a fun Village community event it is lovely to be able to report that we have been able to donate £200 to Northampton Search and Rescue and £200 to C2C, a social action charity. The money was raised from the Tombola, Refreshments and Auction, which was unfortunately rather poorly attended at the end, so some super bargains were to be had there!

If you visited to see what others could do I hope you were inspired to think that you could enter at the next Village Show in 2026, as your efforts are sure to be better!!

Sue Wray