Shropshire Magazine

Mary Bower in her garden, with cyclamen enjoying their well drained site.

Ken Tudor visits a garden which never stops yielding delights.

All-seasons gardener Mary Bower reckons that she has lots of flowers bravely blooming away in her Shropshire garden every day of the year – and after visits in January and February I can vouch for the winter period.

For during the visits to her award-winning creation at Bridgwalton House, near Morville, there were scores of bravely flowering plants putting on the bravest of shows in the bleak midwinter.

Mary is a magnificent gardener, and I have visited her garden during the spring and the summer on a number of occasions. I can understand how she won two Shropshire Gardener of the Year titles with two different gardens.

A nice plump ball of snowballs.

But it was during a visit to Pat Edwards’s wonderful garden at Albrighton that I got chatting to Mary and Lord Kenyon about plants that flower away in the worst of the winter weather. And during my chats about Pat’s hamamelis and Lord Kenyon’s January-flowering viburnums it was clear that Mary had an incredible range of winter colour – and so I called to see her a few days later.

It is a sheer joy to wander around the network of pathways in the weak winter sunshine with Mary, and find real little treasures poking up through the soil or the shingle of a scree. Take the diminutive Iris ‘Katharine Hodgkins’, a pale blue-and-yellow beauty with dark blue and gold markings. How can something so delicate survive the snow, ice and winds? “They are so lovely and it is marvellous to see them coming through in the cold winter weather,” said Mary, admiring the immaculate markings on the petals. It is the same with the real toughies, the winter aconites which suddenly emerge in the border soil and shine their buttercup-like flowers to the sun.

The primulas, including the wonderful native primrose, look too delicate to survive the worst of winter too, but somehow the Cyclamen coum, with their firm shiny leaves, seem to be tougher somehow.

Mary has the cyclamen all over the gardens – in screes, raised beds and, best of all, flourishing among the fallen needles under the pine tree. They are doing well in a bed where an amazing Narcissus cyclamineus, a three-inch-high dwarf daff, pops up alongside them.

They are growing up alongside a dwarf form of euphorbia, flopping on the beds. “I do well with euphorbias because I have very light soil here and they survive in the good drainage,” said Mary. The framework of trees and shrubs gives the garden a maturity, even in its 13th year, with special plants like hamamelis in particular bringing some class to the borders.

In the front garden the attractive ‘Sunburst’ variety was just going over, but in the back a beautifully balanced shrub of Hamamelis ‘Pallida’ was a blaze of yellow blobs of witch hazel blooms.

“I really like the witch hazels and although there are many new varieties I think ‘Pallida’ is still one of the best, because it flowers for so long, is a lovely attractive colour and it has a lovely scent,” she said.

Another gorgeously scented plant is saracocca, with its white sweet-smelling flowers, and standing nearby was a highly attractive architectural form of mahonia with wonderful yellow flowers.

Birds

“They are lovely and I was hoping it would be in full flower when you came, but the birds have stripped every flower off,” she added. We spotted the remarkable Viburnum bodnantense – with its red and pink mini-flowers with the sweetest of scents – and a daphne against the house, again with a scent from heaven. Then there was the tinus variety of viburnum and Skimmia japonica with their lovely domed-headed flowers, as well as a score or more of hellebores, including the wonderful ericsmithii variety and lots of Ashwood Garden Hybrids.

Iris ‘Katharine Hodgkin’.

These days there is always the odd shock, with a plant doing things it should not be achieving. We found, in early February, an osteospermum and an erodium flowering their heads off. “It is incredible, but these things just feel like putting up a flower now,” said Mary. There are also euonymus with gold-and-green foliage, variegated hollies and many fine conifers, with pinus, piceas as well as some superb Juniperus communis ‘Compressa’.

The brave winter flowers in the Bridgwalton garden are wonderful and have come through the seasonal problems, including the odd snowstorm. We all know to go out and knock the snowflakes off branches to reduce the chances of damage.

Mary does this, but goes to a lot of trouble to protect the many fine phormiums, by getting out as it snows. “I tie them up tightly because if wet snow gets into them they just open up and they are ruined as good garden plants,” she explained. They were all tied up when I called because the sudden snowstorm of “very wet snow” on a bleak Monday in November had brought problems.

It is this mixture of excellent cultural skills and an innate desire to get out and tackle the garden, whatever the weather, which makes Mary’s garden so very special.

On both my visits – once on a bright but very cold January morning and the other on a bitterly cold cloudy afternoon – she was working in the borders as she awaited my arrival.

And it was clear that she was enjoying every minute of it, as she does for every week, if not every day, of the year.

As mentioned earlier the garden is renowned as a classic English country garden in the spring and summer; great plantsman Roy Lancaster loved the design and the clever use and choice of plants at Bridgwalton Farm where she lived previously.

That led to her winning the Shropshire Gardener of the Year Competition for the first time, and following it up a few years later with another win when she moved from the farm over Telegraph Lane to Bridgwalton House.

• Mary’s garden is open on Easter Monday, along with other Morville gardens, to raise money for Shropshire Historic Churches Trust. They are open 2pm–6pm.

Helleborus ericsmithii.