I previously posted about the grounds at Welford Park and, as I noted in that post, our reason for being there was the snowdrops. Today I am continuing my excessive posting about snowdrops, and I promise that this will be the last snowdrop post for this year – probably. I was worried that the flowers might have already peaked before we got there but I needn’t have worried. The woodlands were still carpeted with the white blooms. Here are some images that I got as we strolled around.
I am going to be repetitive on the blog for a while. I have already photographed some snowdrops on my bike rides and posted about it. Then I made a more specific visit to see some snowdrops. This will not be the last snowdrop post this year either. In Longstock, there is the Leckford Farm Shop run by Waitrose. Last year I saw lots of bluebells in the grounds when we visited. Dad told me it is a good place for snowdrops too, so Nancy and I diverted in there as part of a walk we were doing in the area.
At first, I only saw a few small clumps on flowers along the path. It had me wondering whether we had missed the peak. However, I just needed some patience. As we got closer to the shop, the area under the trees was covered in snowdrops. They looked really great. With snowdrops, if you are close, they appear to be quite well spaced. Taking shots from further back and lower down helps make them look really dense. They feel that way when you look at them but getting the photo to reflect that sense is a bit more of an effort.
The weather has not been great for cycling during the winter with it being wet. I have ended up riding the trainer indoors to try and keep in some shape. I did get one Sunday when it wasn’t raining but looked like it might. I decided to head out irrespective of the chance of it getting damp. I got lucky and, while it did drizzle occasionally, it was actually pretty dry. As I rode through the country lanes, there were loads of snowdrops along the side of the road and in the trees just off the road. I mostly rode on by but did stop on a couple of occasions to take some photos. Here they are.
We took a walk through the area around Hinton Ampner a few months ago. This was in the spring and was a time when the bluebells were at their peak. There is a footpath around the grounds that takes you through a couple of areas where the bluebells are at their best and there is little chance that you will be alone on this walk if it is a nice weekend. Even so, it did not feel like we were somewhere busy as we took the paths.
The focus for the flowers was when we entered Joan’s Acre Wood. The conditions here are clearly ideal for bluebells and we soon found ourselves transitioning from normal woodland flooring to a sea of blue. It is hard to get an image that really conveys just how much the flowers take over your senses. The blue is intense and contrasts starkly with the green of everything else. In person this is much starker. Hopefully some of these shots will give some sort of impression of what it was like. We were surrounded by bluebells and quite blown away by it.
Just outside Stockbridge in Hampshire is a small village called Leckford. There is an estate there called Longstock, and the retail group John Lewis owns some (or maybe all) of the land. They have the farm and run a shop there but, if you walk down the hill from the nursery area (or drive if the walk doesn’t appeal), you come to the Longstock Park Water Gardens. This is an ornamental garden area around some ponds.
You have to pay to enter this area while the other areas are free to access. It isn’t too expensive, though. Then you are free to stroll around the area around the ponds and on to the islands that are scattered throughout and connected by little bridges (although there are one or two dead ends that require you to reverse course).
The are also some areas that take you away from the ponds and behind the trees so plenty to explore. This takes you closer to the River Test that winds its way through this valley. There is a wide variety of plant life throughout the gardens. We were there, there were some blossoms on the trees and lots of other blooms flowering. I imagine that the colours change a bit throughout the season. The tree shapes are really cool too. Here is a selection of images that I took as we wandered around. If you in the area, I would recommend it as a visit for an hour or two.
Spring in the UK means bluebells will start showing up. I will come back to this topic in another post but, when we went to Farm Shop in Leckford , the road in came through some trees which had a carpet of bluebells beneath them. While Nancy was wandering around the shop, I did grab the camera and head along the road to get some bluebell shots. This was a nice start to the season but there will be more to come.
Earlier in the year, we made an afternoon visit to Wisley – the headquarters of the Royal Horticultural Society. I have posted about it previously but, this post is about some of the really cool looking plants that they have. That is what you would expect for a horticultural society, of course. Some of them are really fascinating looking plants so here are some shots.
Organized gardens can certainly look very attractive, but the wildflower look can be even better at times. There are some meadow areas at Bloedel Reserve and one of them was overloaded with poppies when we visited. There were restrictions on how close you could get at the time because they were protecting various areas from foot traffic. I had left the longer lens in the car so I was limited to what I could manage with the 24-105 but that didn’t matter too much. The reds and golds of the poppies looked fantastic and, while I would have liked to have shot a tighter crop through the flowers, I was happy to make do with the views available to me.
While walking through Richmond, we came along a street of older houses in what seemed like quite a desirable neighborhood. The dominant feature of most of these houses was the preponderance of wisteria on their frontages. Some of the plants were confined to one house while others seemed to span whatever property that they felt like. The purple blooms were most impressive, and it seemed like they were competing to see which house could be more purple than the next. I don’t know how long wisteria blooms for so did we get lucky with our timing, or could we have been there at a wider range of times?
Spring means rhododendrons and our favorite place to go looking for them is Meerkerk. A sunny weekend forecast meant we made the trip over to Whidbey to see how things looked. Visiting has always been a bit of a crapshoot for us. Will we get there before they come into full bloom? Will they already be passed their prime? This time I think we hit it pretty spot on.
The bushes were full of color with blooms all over the place. A few may have peaked, and some were, no doubt, still to come, but so much was looking great, I think we couldn’t have done better. Aside for a family that had brought along a photographer to take images of their small son who seemed very uninterested in doing anything they wanted resulting in the photographer’s voice being audible across the gardens, things were very tranquil. (They didn’t stay long, and it was so nice when I heard them say they were leaving – of course I heard them say that, you heard everything they said!). Will we be so lucky next time? Who knows?
