March has been all about the Magnolias!
The blue skies and warm weather have set the backdrop to Marwood’s magnificently flowering magnolias in pink, white and purple blooms. They are absolutely stunning to see dotted across the garden. Arguably it has been the best Magnolia displays at Marwood Hill Gardens for 50 years – this has been due to a lack of spring frosts, relatively warm weather and moderate rain all reduced any stress to the trees. Unfortunately, it took just one big wind to scatter the petals to the ground. A sad sight for the gardeners but a happy opportunity for lots of our younger garden visitors to fling ‘confetti’ up into the air.
Luckily visitors still have had plenty to see, with our 500 camellias putting on a stunningly colourful show. So good, in fact, that Marwood won the early flowering camellia completion at RHS garden Rosemoor this month. Malcolm and Lin, two of our gardeners, skilfully selected, picked and transported a perfect bloom – Camellia ‘Harold Paige’ and won the Best in bloom prize. Together with this award, they also received many other 2nd prizes for other Camellias and their floral displays. The whole team are very proud of their efforts. Our Gardener, Lin, is dedicated to growing and caring for camellias in our walled garden glass house. If you haven’t had the chance to see this yet, it really is worth a visit, full of rare reticulata type camellias with impressively large flowers 10cm across.
We took the decision to open the gardens for the last few weekends in March because we were desperate to share our garden with visitors and especially to share the opportunity to see magnificent Magnolias before they finished flowering. The feedback was wonderful! We were also delighted by an unexpected visit from the BBC Devon South West Spotlight team. They came just in time to interview the gardeners about the spring displays and really caught the Magnolias looking at their best. This was wonderful publicity for our garden!
We’d like to thank everyone who visited us in March. It was a very busy few weeks and a great way to kickstart the season.
All in all, it has been an eventful month, we are looking forward to seeing what April holds in store for us. If you’d like to visit us the garden, plant sales and tearoom are open Wednesday – Sunday 10am-4.30pm weekly.
