Description:
Westonbury Mill Water Gardens is a magical place, surrounded by old meadows and orchards and having wonderful views to the surrounding hills. The 3 ½ acre garden is laid out around a tangle of streams and ponds behind the old corn mill and has a huge variety of colourful plants, mostly moisture loving varieties often up to their shoulders in bog. Giant plants are favourites with one area where you can walk through a forest of Gunnera, the huge leaved Brazilian ‘rhubarb’. High banks combine with giant plants to divide the garden into ‘rooms’ and one huge mound with a spiral walk gives a splendid view over the adjacent wild flower meadow.
The garden is beautiful, and it is fun too. The owner, Richard Pim, has a flair for making quirky features and follies on a heroic scale and every part of the garden has something to make you laugh or smile. There is a 20 ft stone tower with a tank which is filled by a chain of buckets driven by an old iron water wheel. When full the tank empties with a great gush through the mouths of gargoyles on the outside of the tower. Forty doves live in the tower and coo at you from its battlements. Richard’s ‘African summer house’, thatched with bullrushes, makes an elegant feature at the end of the garden, and, recently built, is a fern house with a dome made of thousands of bottles which sparkle in the sun like a cathedral window. A new construction is an elegant oak tower with a water powered clock and fully visible singing bird mechanism in the style of the gardens of baroque Italy.
The garden has been featured on Gardeners’ World TV, and in Country Life and most national papers and garden magazines.
At the entrance to the garden is a café with a large outside sitting area which is beside beside the stream and looks over the mill’s large water meadow. Fresh local produce is home cooked for lunch, and cream teas are available in the afternoon.
There is a plant nursery for perennials including many moisture loving species.
The garden is open daily from 1st April to 30th September.
Entrance is £4.00 for adults and £1 for children.
80%of the garden is accessible to the disabled. There is a disabled toilet.
Dogs on leads welcome
It is signposted by brown ‘Water Gardens’ on the A44 1 ½ miles on the Kington side of Pembridge.
Phone 01544388650
When visiting Westonbury Mill Water Gardens, please mention you found them on Goherefordshire.co.uk
Herefordshire Gardens - Westonbury Mill Water Gardens
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