Garden Tour 2025

We visited several gardens in the Wirral and Cheshire, both large and small in early June.

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Gresgarth Hall -  our stop on the journey south, this garden has been designed to be viewed across the large lake from the house and we  wandered around to admire the clever  planting and specimen trees and shrubs. It is a lovely peaceful space with some really interesting plants.

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Bluebell Cottage - developed since 2007, this 1.5 acre garden has well filled herbaceous beds, with unusual trees giving height to the views and an orchard underplanted with a wildflower meadow and generous displays of grasses. The lower part of the garden has a pond and shade and damp loving plants. A sheltered walled garden with a charming moon gate led to a shady cool pathway.

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Homestead Garden - packed into a small plot 20m x 20m , was a wealth of perfumed roses on fences and obelisks, a profusion of clematis at head height, and many vigorous and well chosen perennials in full bloom. Dappled shade from two mature slender birch trees added to the lush dense feeling., with tall clipped hedges providing a restrained background.

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Laskey Farm - The current owners inherited the 122-acre Laskey Farm in 1995 when they started turning part of it into a garden. On one side of the garden were five inter-linked pools - one had terrapins lazing in the sun, another housed assorted large fish as well as doubling up as a swimming pool, and they were all a haven for invertebrates, insects and water plants.  On the other side of the garden was a long herbaceous border and colourful rose beds.

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Parm Place -  a long and sloping half-acre garden, hidden behind old cottages with a  narrow entranceway packed with grasses, and interesting trees serving as a backdrop, including a magnificent fastigiate weeping copper beech. The area then opened out onto a perfect winding lawn lined with herbaceous borders, a rock garden, and a rill connecting two small ponds and a bog area. The highlight plant here was a Purple Pitcher Plant, Sarracenia purpurea, in full flower. The lawn widened to feature a circular parterre filled with lavender. Steps then led down from a rose bed to a kitchen garden, with views over the fields below and across South Cheshire beyond.

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Briarfield Garden - situated the south side of Burton Wood. The 2-acregarden is situated on a south-facing slope, where the soil varies from very sandy with underlying sandstone at the top of the hill to reasonable loam towards the bottom. The garden is home to many specialist and unusual plants.

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Ness Botanic Gardens  - spread across 64 acres with lovely views of the River Dee and North Wales, the gardens were founded in 1898 by Liverpool cotton merchant Arthur Kilpin Bulley who had a passion for gardens and plant collecting. After his death, the gardens were presented to the University of Liverpool with an endowment of £75,000, on the condition that they were to be preserved as a Botanic Garden.

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Originally the most important features were the herbaceous borders and the rock garden and, in recent years these have been redesigned and developed  and the whole garden enhanced by the addition of a modern rose garden, extensive water gardens and woodland walks, including an azalea border and wildflower meadows. An interesting recent development near the Visitor Centre is a series of beds, each of which is devoted to plants of the same family.