Here at Railholiday we believe strongly in home-grown wherever possible. We’re business members of The Cornwall Wildlife Trust, and try and make our gardens as nature friendly as we can. As part of our welcome pack we always like to decorate our carriages with vases of flowers. If all four are occupied, that’s twelve vases. So with winter short breaks that can mean a total of twenty-four vases a week, which is no mean feat.
We are particularly lucky to have a gardener who also has a garden that’s a plant-person’s dream. Each Friday Lil arrives with armfuls of freshly cut flowers. In the winter this is usually viburnums, and early camellias and spring bulbs. We also have dedicated winter gardens, packed full of hellebores, mahonia, hyacinths, azaleas, pulmonaria, primulas, and plenty of narcissi, snowdrop, hyacinth and fritillary bulbs. Evergreen sprays from pine and rosemary create a lovely scented bouquet and staples such as variegated euonymous, myrtle, lonicera and pittosporum make an interesting greenery spray to pad out the vases when flowers are in short supply.
As well as growing flowers for the vases, we also make sure there are plenty of flowers for the pollinators too. Winter can be unpredictable, and when the weather is suddenly unseasonably warm for a few days early bees and other insects sleepily crawl out of their hibernating hidey-holes to find there is no food. To help we have underplanted our lawns with crocus bulbs, a favourite of pollinators. They also look lovely on a bright winter’s day, as the petals unfurl to welcome the sun.
Perhaps now is a good time to comment that our gardens are never truly tidy. Wildlife needs long grass, and plenty of dead stems to hibernate in, so we tend to delay cutting back our hollow stemmed perennials so there’s never any shortage of winter bug abodes.
We have over the last few years become galanthophiles – which is just a fancy way of saying we really love snowdrops. We planted some in our ten acres of woodland over two decades ago, but they didn’t seem to do anything. However about nine years ago we had a lovely surprise when we discovered they’d made their way down the slope and had occupied a derelict old track. So we spent a few years clearing, opening up a pathway through which has become our snowdrop walk.
Every year for the last eight years I’ve collected snowdrops from friends’ gardens, spread the ones that we already have, and bought the occasional species snowdrop to keep things interesting, so we’ve got little snowdrops, big snowdrops, double snowdrops and plenty more in-between.
The number of snowdrops planted now is well into the thousands and from mid January our snowdrop walk is stunning. From late February the wild garlic takes over, and we have another pollinator-friendly plant putting on a fine show.
So visitors at Railholiday can be assured that whatever time of year they visit, there always will be interest in the gardens and never any shortage of flowers in the vases. And the wildlife is happy too!
