Description:The name captures the setting. Award-winning 1¾-acre spring garden. Terraced lawns for lingering over tea. Woodland walks through blossom trees, wild anemones, primroses and bluebells. Extensive shrubbery with camellias, azaleas and rhododendrons. Stream and large wildlife pond with primulas, marginals and waterlilies. Bog garden, wet meadow, spring bulbs and herbaceous and mixed borders
Featured in Gardens of Dorset

Further details:The setting here is a tranquil clearing surrounded by mature trees. You approach the garden down a single track lane – in through the gates, a glimpse of woodland, and then the gravel drive lined with shrubs. The side-gate entrance is shady; but suddenly you are out in the sunlight again and up some steps to a curved herbaceous border, almost overwhelmed by a glorious yellow rose (banksiae lutea) cascading over the backing wall. The woodland walk is awash with wood anemones, primroses and bluebells on either side of a grassy path, overhung with blossom, and everywhere the perfume from the yellow azaleas filters among the warm toned camellias.

When the owners redeveloped the garden some twenty years ago they tried to keep as many of the existing trees and shrubs as possible, as a backdrop to the newer ornamentals they planned to introduce. Thus, despite being less than a mile from the centre of Ferndown, it still has the atmosphere and seclusion of a country garden, harking back to the 1930s when the house was built and its surroundings were first laid out.

There are mature rhododendrons, cornus florida, stewartia and kalmia, as well as many native trees – oak and ash, beech and birch – which mark the boundaries. Recent additions include a substantial wild-life pond with water lilies and marginal planting, a rippling stream and a large bog garden with ferns, primulas, filipendulas and purple loosestrife.

The whole site covers approximately one and three quarter acres, and is one of the few larger gardens remaining in a town where so many have been divided up and built over. The owners want to keep it that way for as long as they can – a real oasis of calm abundance in a busy world. It can be visited on three or four Sundays each Spring, between mid April and early June, when there are also home-made teas made available by local supporters of Citizens Advice