Bluebells and Blossoms

Betley Court Garden’s bluebells (Hyacinthoides non-scripta) are at their full splendour at the end of April. If you look down the long path, past the visitors’ hub towards the gazebo, a blue haze shimmers through the trees. For those of us with fine tuned olfactory senses, there is also a subtle perfume. It is one of the horticultural highlights of the Betley Court year, one I look forward to immensely. Our late Professor would have enjoyed the view.

Hyacithoides non-scripta, the native English bluebell

Bluebells aren’t the only flowers in bloom at the moment. Some fifteen years ago, Nigel planted pips from some heritage apples that we bought at a horticultural college open day. Apple trees grown this way have a special name; pippins, and now every year, late April they blossom, much to the delight of the local insect population, who buzz around pollinating them.

Apple blossom on one of our pippin trees

These trees do produce a reliable crop of apples every autumn, although, being pippins, you’re not guaranteed what kind of apple they will produce. Sometimes you get a hybrid that is an eating apple, or sometimes a cooking apple. As it happens, our pippin trees produce a varying range of very dry apples that Nigel delights in pressing to make rather tart apple juice. This is quite a sharp juice, which we drink at breakfast. The remainder ends up as the basis for homemade cider. If you are used to sweeter pub ciders, this is not the tipple for you. UK-based readers of this blog may be familiar with The Archers, a BBC Radio 4 soap opera about a rural farming community, in the fictional village of Ambridge. The patriarch of the Grundy family, Joe, made a similar alcoholic beverage each autumn, and created a ‘cider club’ to distribute the legendary but lethal brew amongst the villagers. I suspect Nigel sees himself carving out a similar role for himself in Betley as he gets older, when he can dedicate more time to the gentle art of cidermaking.

Pear blossom

The pear and cherry trees up on the paddock are also in flower, in shades from soft white to candy pink. We have a mix of edible cherry trees and ornamental, and the use of the paddock for cherry trees harks back to the very earliest recorded use of this field. On William Emes’s landscape design, this area is referred to as the cherry field, and it is from here that people enjoying the pleasure grounds of Betley Court entered the wild walk across farm pasture to Betley Mere (now part of the Speed family’s Betley Court Farm).

Flowering cherry

Industrial Heras fencing has begun to arrive on the front lawn. It heralds the beginning of a new chapter in our lives at Betley Court, namely the rebuild. My stomach knots every time I see it, because I know, sooner or later, heavy machinery will arrive to start the formation of a site yard on the formal lawns at the front of the house – one of the conditions placed on us by the local authority for being permitted to rebuild the roof.

More Heras fencing arrives on the formal lawns to the front of the house

Whilst the formal beds I have tended for many years now have escaped being covered by hardcore (an early suggestion from the rebuild team that Nigel quickly dismissed, ensuring marital harmony!), they will be caged behind this horrible Heras fencing for their own protection. It is one of ‘the necessaries’ we need to do, to get Betley Court back to its beautiful best. The contractors estimate this will take just over a year, then we can remove the upper portion of our immense temporary roof. Then, and only then, we can start deciding what to do with the inside of the house.

Inside the temporary roof structure, which makes Betley Court look like a dolls house. Photo: MD Scaffolding Services Ltd.

People outside the village have begun to notice what’s happening at Betley Court, and the Scaffolding Association have been in touch to ask if they can film inside our scaffolding structure. We’re quite excited to have a drone inside the building to capture the early stages of the rebuild. It’ll be as interesting to our family archive as it is to the scaffolding industry!

All best wishes

Ladybird Su