Preparing for summer with thousands of seedlings

Now it’s April, we’re hoping for some decent weather (even though it is an unpredictable month) – there is nothing better for the soul than being able to enjoy some time outside, whether that’s in the garden or just in the fresh air. And we can all agree that we need this more than ever.

The gardeners will be taking the lawnmowers out of hibernation this month and will be tackling the lawns for the first time this year. The grass is very long thanks to the wet and relatively mild winter we’ve just had, so the settings will be on high to make sure we don’t damage it. As the weeks go on, we’ll gradually increase the settings to get a shorter, neater cut.

We also need to do more tidying up and will be cutting back dead stems and using metal plant supports on our perennials in our herbaceous border.

We’re looking forward to the summer months and we can promise a fantastic display of bedding plants again this year because we’ll be potting up 4,000 summer bedding plug plants, including marigolds, verbena and begonia, for the terrace, bandstand and car park.

The garden team will prepare thousands of more plants, too, as we sow and prick out (transplant seedlings into cells) other summer bedding plants in the nursery, as well as pot up dahlia tubers in the nursery, to be planted out on the terrace glasshouse beds in early June. It’s time-intensive work, but definitely worth it!

Now that the sun is getting stronger, we’ll start to increase our watering in the glasshouses and nursery, and we’re on the home stretch with our new Alpine Garden, which will be unveiled soon because we will be planting hundreds of different species.