Woodside is located in a Victorian walled garden, and so is the perfect place to site a garden centre. Ornamental borders surround the garden centre and cafe, and there is always something interesting to see. Stephen and I (Emma) are currently doing a lot of tidying up and replanting of many of the borders – Stephen used to be a head gardener for the National Trust so he really knows what he is doing! Future plans involve introducing more climbers on the walls, and to plant several varieties of rose, as well as increasing the area we dedicate to our kitchen garden. All of this will take time (and money) both of which are always in short supply, so please bear with us whilst we create our beautiful garden.
Our walled garden is surrounded by trees and so the garden is visited by an impressive number of wild birds, which can be observed at close quarters at the window feeders of the café. We see blue tits, great tits, coal tits, chaffinch, greenfinch, bullfinch, goldfinch, sparrows, dunnocks, siskins, blackbirds, wrens, nuthatch and greater spotted woodpeckers feeding close to the window. (Did I miss anything?)
For the last 3 years we have been lucky enough to have nuthatches nesting in the garden. Even better, we have had a camera in the nest box and our customers have watched their nest building, egg laying, hatching and fledging.
Unfortunately, we have only 2 bird viewing tables in the café and demand for these is fierce! So, with our friends from the local group of the RSPB, we have started work on building a wildlife garden in the south west corner of the walled garden. We hope that this garden will be fully open to our visitors in June this year.
With funding from “Awards for All”, the garden is designed to show how easy it is to attract wildlife to your own garden. As always, we’ll give you top tips and handy hints to make your garden buzz with wildlife.
The RSPB use our old shop to use as an information and viewing centre, and to let you get a close view, we have wired the garden for cameras to show you more nesting and feeding birds.
We hope you’ll visit often and watch this new garden develop.
In the meantime, if you want to attract more wild birds to your garden, here’s some plants to try.
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