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About The Old Vicarage, Bishops Castle
The gardens of the Old Vicarage originally extended to over five acres and there are historic photographs from its heyday when a team of gardeners would have kept manicured lawns, pergolas and a large kitchen garden. Evidence can still be seen beyond the modern boundaries; tall garden walls in the new Rectory garden and two magnificent Wellingtonia, (Sequoiadendron Giganteum) to the south, planted we wonder by an intrepid plant hunting vicar, a missionary to the Americas.
Reduced to just over one and a half acres, the gardens had become derelict, to be restored and reinvented since the 1980’s when the Vicarage passed into private ownership. It now includes several lawned areas surrounded by perennial beds and mature shrubs, an ornamental pond, (currently undergoing work), an orchard and a romantic ruin, fragments of the lost thirteenth century church and Grade 2 listed in its own right.
The current owners have had the garden since 2016 and have been engaged in a program of radical pruning of over-matured shrubs and storm damaged trees, notably a mulberry and a large weeping willow. In early summer the garden is full of colour; foxgloves, roses, wisteria, rhododendron, alliums, buttercups and ornamental trees. Numerous shrubs have been relocated and beds replanted with herbaceous perennials. The orchard has been restocked, a grove of silver birch and other trees planted on the lower lawn and a collection of bamboos and grasses established in swathes beside the pond. Most recently, a new rose garden has been planted, a more formal and ‘secret garden’ concealed within mature yew hedging. Following the ethos of ‘Caring for God’s Acre’ who manage the adjacent churchyard, we have abandoned pesticides and herbicides, encouraging that long undisturbed ecosystem to thrive. Promoting biodiversity, we celebrate the dandelion as an early source of nectar for the bees, leave un-mown margins for small mammals to stalk and retain tree stumps and wood piles to encourage insects who in turn, feed the bats living in surrounding trees.
Our open day will include promotion of the local initiative ‘Going Wild in Bishops Castle’ showcasing the project to date.
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