The Old Vicarage, Bishops Castle

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 think by an intrepid plant hunting vicar, a missionary to the Americas in the late eighteenth century.
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. Tending toward the wild, in early summer the garden is full of colour; foxgloves, wisteria, rhododendron, alliums, buttercups and ornamental trees. Over the course of the pandemic, numerous shrubs have been relocated and beds replanted with herbaceous perennials. The orchard has been restocked, a grove of silver birch and other ornamental 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 ‘secret garden’ concealed within mature yew hedging.