After I finished up at Shrewsbury Abbey I spotted a sign across the road for Shropshire Wildlife Trust and decided to take a look. The garden is free to enter and volunteers each have their own part of the garden they look after – no one paid the slightest bit of attention to me as I wandered around.
The Quarry is a 29 acre, Grade II listed park in Shrewsbury that borders the town and the River Severn. I found myself walking around here quite a few times on my visit to the town – on my arrival after checking in to my B&B to stretch my legs and as a convenient place to sit and watch the world go by when I needed a break from walking around.
Back in September I stayed in Shrewsbury for four nights in part because it is a quick 20 minute train ride to Welshpool and Powis Castle which I’ve wanted to visit for a while now. A National Trust property the castle is around a 40 minute walk from Welshpool Railway Station through a quiet deer park which I didn’t quite get to appreciate due to the pouring rain – even well prepared with a raincoat and good walking boots I was decidedly sodden by the time I got back to my B&B later that afternoon!
Back in the beginning of June I went along to the Open Gardens event in Burton Joyce, a village just outside Nottingham. I’m fairly familiar with the village as a friend grew up there but I’d never been to the Open Gardens event before. 11 gardens were open to the public with the ticket price (£6 if booked in advance) going towards Maggie’s, a cancer charity based at Nottingham City Hospital.
I visited the National Garden three times during my visit to Athens, once to walk through on the way to the Panathenaic Stadium, once for some welcome shade to reapply my sunscreen before heading to the Benaki Museum and once to actually explore the gardens themselves. They are 38 acres (so I didn’t explore the whole thing) and up until 1974 were called the Royal Garden, which gives you the first hint about their origins.
I went to school in Gedling, right next to Gedling House, and so the building has always been a source of fascination – the house and grounds were naturally out of bounds for the pupils. One weekend in mid-September it was opened to the public for free as part of the Heritage Open Days and I jumped at the chance to have a look around. Built in 1790 as a home for a wealthy Nottingham banker it is now a Buddhist meditation centre.
Every so often I do a post about the birds and animals I’ve photographed in the garden. We’ve had quite a few interesting visitors that I haven’t managed to photograph or that we’ve only caught on our nature camera overnight such as cats, hedgehogs, foxes and once quite memorably a badger but there are others that stuck around long enough for me to grab my camera. One such creature was this rat which had taken a liking to the seeds I put out for the birds (I moved the bird feeder around and took a break from re-filling it and this worked for a little while). [Since starting to write this post I found the rat dead in our garden – RIP].
I’d put the Botanic Gardens down on my weather dependent list and thankfully while there was a lot of heavy rain during my visit to Cambridge all of it occured in the evening long after I’d returned to my hotel. Thus I was able to spend several hours walking around the gardens without needing to worry about seeking shelter from the elements. The gardens contain over 8,000 plant species primarily as a teaching and research resource.
A small green space just down the road from Mostyn Art Gallery, it perhaps isn’t the most photogenic of Llandudno’s areas but it is home to the White Rabbit statue, part of the Alice in Wonderland trail and a couple of other interesting items, including what I’ve since learnt are some infamous public toilets. It was named for the nearby North Western Hotel which is now a Premier Inn.
Happy Valley Botanical Gardens are tucked away at the side of the Great Orme just along from the pier. The land was that of a former quarry which was gifted to the town by Lord Mostyn in celebration of the Golden Jubilee of Queen Victoria in 1887. The quarry was turned into gardens with an open air theatre and miniature golf course which has since been turned back into gardens and a ski slope and toboggan run.
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