National Gardens Scheme Featured Content

The Old Vicarage, Burley

Church Road,  Burley,  Oakham,  Leicestershire & Rutland,  LE15 7SU

Opening dates and times:Sun 26 May (1.30-5). Evening Opening , wine, Wed 12 June (6-9)

Visitors also welcome by appt late May to June

Admission:Adm £4, chd free (share to Eden Valley Hospice)

Facilities:

Refreshments:Home-made teas

Contact:Jonathan & Sandra Blaza   Telephone: 01572 770588
Email: sandra.blaza@btinternet.com

Postcode:LE15 7SU

Location:1m NE of Oakham. 
In Burley just off B668 between Oakham and Cottesmore. Church Rd is opposite the village green, the Old Vicarage first left off Church Rd
click here for a map

Description:3-acre country garden, planted for year-round interest, incl walled garden (with vine-house) producing fruit, herbs, vegetables and cut flowers. Formal lawns and borders, lime walk, rose gardens and a rill through an avenue of standard wisteria. Wildlife garden with pond, 2 orchards and beech woodland
Winner - Country Living Kitchen Table Talent Awards

Disability information:Some gravel and steps

Further details:This is a 3 acre country garden, looking out over the Vale of Catmose in a westerly direction and over parkland to Burley House in the east. By the mid-1990s the garden was mainly laid to grass and the most remarkable features were some fine old trees and a fabulous display of snowdrops in the winter.

In the last ten years the garden has been redesigned to introduce some structure and the ground landscaped to give a series of terraces. Hedges of yew, beech, hornbeam and box have added definition and divided the whole into parts united by common themes such as border colour or type of plant. There is now a rose garden, home to a mixture of traditional old roses and David Austin’s English roses, geraniums, peonies, clematis and salvias, and another of white roses planted with blue and purple irises, aconitum and asters. A terrace which links the two rose gardens has white standard wisteria trees and purple irises behind a lavender hedge. Completing this corner of the garden is a rill which runs out from a circular pond though an avenue of purple standard wisteria. Paths lead from the rill, through the white rose garden on to a lawn surrounded by borders in various colour combinations.

Beyond the lawn is the ornamental kitchen garden with high brick walls; here there is fruit of all sorts, herbs, and cutting beds for flowers. Four pairs of vegetable beds, edged with step-over apples and alpine strawberries are managed in crop rotation. The vine-house provides shelter for grape vines, peaches and nectarines and tomatoes and peppers in season. A path leads from the walled garden, behind a pleached hornbeam hedge, into an orchard of plums, gages, cherries and apricots planted in a wild flower meadow and then on into an old orchard of apples. Across the paddock, the ground falls away towards the wild pond and a wild area planted with acers and wild flowers and returns to the house though a gravelled walk of pollarded lime trees, hardy geraniums and Japanese anenomes.

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