Gallery: Impressions of Four Cotswold Orchards

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.

Veteran fruit trees in the old orchard at Hidcote
Slightly less veteran but still mature trees at Hidcote
Mature orchard trees at Painswick Rococo Garden
Looking across a section of espaliered fruit trees to the main orchard at Painswick Rococo Garden
Recently established trees in the orchard at the Museum in the Park, Stroud
A veteran fruit tree at the Museum in the Park, Stroud
The main garden orchard at Snowshill Manor
Fruit trees in Piper’s orchard at Snowshill Manor

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