Last week, my wife Jo and I decided to stick to our long-made plans to spend a few days visiting a few gardens (ones with promising-sounding orchards, naturally) down in Gloucestershire and the wider Cotswolds area of outstanding natural beauty.
Flow-tested before we travelled, socially distant throughout and staying in an airy and spacious self-catering apartment at the (highly recommended) Five Valleys Aparthotel in Stroud, we were about as safe and responsible as we possibly could be in these continually troubled and troubling times.
The gardens we visited – Hidcote (NT), Painswick Rococo Garden, the walled garden at Stroud’s Museum in the Park, and Snowshill Manor and Garden (NT) – were all absolutely delightful, especially in the early June sunshine, and each in its own way and according to its own unique character.
I’ll be writing a longer post on each garden, with a particular focus on their orchard offerings, and with plenty of photos. But for now, here’s a short taster gallery of some of the sights we saw and the orchards we experienced. Please do join my email notification list if you’d like to receive a weekly digest of new content, which will include links to the full posts when I’ve managed to find time to write them up.
