Create your own Polesden Lacey garden

Grow your own

The Kitchen Garden at Polesden Lacey, made up of the veg garden, orchard, fruit cage and herb beds, usually supplies the kitchens with produce to create delicious dishes for our visitors.

Spring is the perfect time to grow your own lovely fruit, veg and salad. Sow seeds in trays or egg boxes on your window sill for the likes of tomatoes, salad, courgettes and chillis and plant them out when they’re big enough and the risk of frost has passed. 

Later, you can direct sow beans, radishes and pumpkins outdoors or even plant a fruit tree.  The garden centres may be currently closed but mail order companies can still deliver seeds, plugs and plants to your door in good time to get a bumper 2020 crop. 

Cut and come again

The Cut Flower Garden provides blooms and foliage for displays in the house in a normal year, but much like the Kitchen Garden, it's having a bit of a rest currently. 

Why not have a go at growing cut flowers in your garden at home to brighten up the house?  Like veg seeds, many cut flowers are annuals, meaning they germinate, grow, flower and then die in a single year. 

There’s still plenty of time to sow the likes of cosmos, sunflowers, sweet peas, calendula and snap dragons for example.  Sow them indoors now, or direct sow later in spring – easy!  And the more you pick them, the longer their flowering season will be.

Bring the outdoors inside

If you don’t have a garden there are still plenty of ways to bring a little Polesden Lacey garden magic to your home. 

You can grown indoor bulbs such as Hyacinths for example or plant tomatoes or salad leaves in a window box. Herbs love growing on a sunny window sill and ferns can thrive indoors just as well.

Planning: bulb displays

Right now the garden at Polesden Lacey is full of spring bulbs like daffodils naturalising in our grassed areas such as the entrance drives or Theatre Lawn and tulips in the borders around the mansion. The best time to plant spring bulbs is in the autumn. Last autumn we planted around 180,000 bulbs around the grounds, making it nearly 300,00 over the last five years. 

Not many of us have the luxury of space to plant those numbers at home but it’s amazing the effect of even a few bulbs can have in brightening up your garden.  Now is a great time to go through the bulb catalogues and plan your autumn purchases for next year’s displays.

Keep in touch

We'd love to see your efforts - why not share your pictures with us on social media? We're on Facebook, Twitter and Instagam @PolesdenLaceyNT and if you have any questions - just shout and we'll do our best to help.