Autumn Sundays at Hole Park Gardens

Beautiful flowers

Hole Park Gardens is renowned for bluebells, beautifully clipped topiary and great yew hedges, but there are other surprises too. In the autumn you can see the spectacular late flowering agapanthus ‘Hole Park Blue’.

The 16 acre gardens include a vibrant exotic border, which look amazing through to the end of October. The mature trees and Japanese Maples provide striking autumn colour around the gardens and woodland.

Visitors can enjoy a pretty circular walk which takes walkers to a renovated Ice House, a 1740’s construction which was used to store ice long before the days of refrigeration. When the ice was cut and stacked it would last for up to three years in this cool environment!

Open on Wednesday and Thursdays until the end of October visitors can also enjoy additional Sunday opening on 2, 9, 16, 23 and 30 October 2016.

Head gardener Quentin Stark describes this year’s exotic border: ‘As well as the more familiar exotic plants such as cannas, banana plants, grasses, gingers and gazanias, we have a couple of new varieties of dahlia, 'Bishop of Oxford' which has single orange flowers and dark leaves and dahlia ' Bishop of York' which is a single yellow cultivar also with dark foliage and Salvia haenkei 'Prawn Chorus' which is a dwarf cultivar derived from the Bolivian species, with masses of small bright red flowers that look like prawns!

‘New this year is Ricinus communist 'New Zealand Red' which is grown for its large glossy red palmate leaves – great for contrast against the greens. We're also using a couple of climbers up frames to give height in the border including Mina lobata which has spikes of orange flowers that fade to white and Lablab purpureus from Africa, which is a purple leaved and pink flowered member of the bean family.

‘We have planted a number of Colchiums bulbs or naked ladies in the meadow by the heather garden and hopefully they will flower in October.’

Afternoon tea with homemade cakes are available in the coach house tea room.

For more information, please see www.holepark.com

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