January in the Lodge Gardens

 

There are lots of flowers in the gardens this month including some unusual and sweetly scented ones.  At the rear of the car park there is a huge bank of strange mauve flowers, winter heliotrope Petasites fragrans, which scent the air with vanilla. The non-native plant was introduced by the Victorians who liked its sweet smell as do the early insects. All the plants here are male so it doesn’t set seed but spreads by underground rhizomes and unfortunately it has become very invasive and difficult to control. It is also poisonous to dogs.  More delicate are the pink flowers of the hybrid Viburnum x bodnantense ‘Dawn’ named for the famous Welsh garden Bodnant. These are the large shrubs in the herbaceous borders south of the rose garden and the winter garden to the west of the children’s swings.  The third plant to look out for is the sweet box plant Sarcococca which looks very understated in the corner of the tropical bed just inside the arched entrance from the car park. By the end of the month it will be in full flower, releasing the wonderful scent which gives the plant its common name.

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There is lots of winter colour from the red (Cornus alba sibirica) and orange (C Midwinter Fire) dogwood stems, the yellow sprays of flowers on the Mahonia bushes and the unusual white stems of the white stemmed Chinese bramble, Rubus cockburnianus.