Fresh from being awarded a VisitEngland Gold accolade for the quality of its visitor experience, Staffordshire’s Trentham Gardens are set to spring to life like never before as dazzling new displays join traditional seasonal highlights at the award-winning attraction.
Open every day, apart from Christmas Day, Trentham Gardens offer a natural wonderland throughout the year, and spring proves to be a perennial favourite among visitors thanks to colourful displays of seasonal blooms.
Thousands of daffodils planted en mass on the Western Pleasure Garden lawns create a sea of gold – set against the stunning backdrop of Capability Brown’s majestic cedars and yews and beautifully contrasted by ribbons of purple Dutch crocus.
Other seasonal highlights include a fabulous bedding display in the Upper Parterre, spring bulb displays in the Eastern Pleasure Gardens, and the spring flower underplanting at the Floral Labyrinth
April sees tulips offer bands of colour on the balustrades border, featuring tens of thousands of yellow and orange tulips, while the upper flower garden boasts tulips and daffodils in pastel colours – baby blue, sugar pinks, and yellow primroses, offering an Easter Bonnet colour palette.
Already one of the top four most popular paid-for garden attractions in England, Trentham – on the edge of Stoke-on-Trent – is a historic garden regeneration that continues to innovate and grow – making it one of the UK’s ’must see’ gardens.
For 2018, new plantings of sweetly scented flowering perennials, including primroses and sweet violets with native wild strawberries and sweet woodruff, are set to provide a carpet of colour on Spring Bank, which has been cleared of Rhododendron to offer fresh displays.
A new woodland meadow – designed by Chelsea gold medalist Nigel Dunnett, who is best known, perhaps, for his role in the Olympic plantings at London’s Queen Elizabeth Park – has been planted with seven distinctive mixes to create swathes of perennial form, colour and textural interest with peak flowering through the spring.
Trentham is also set to be THE place to see magnolia with 700 magnolia trees planted to date in in Burke’s Wood with single species groves in “naturalistic stands” to create a wave of white, pink and claret red. Many species started flowering last spring, and are expected to grow in scale each year before reaching its full potential in around seven years.
For a spring-time adventure, visitors can follow Trentham’s ever-popular Fairy Trail, with sculptures of fairies and giant dandelions, or discover the bronze pheasants rising from prairie planting and giant tree frogs emerging from the undergrowth as part of an installation of bronze wildlife sculptures by artist David Meredith dotted around the gardens.
As well as winning awards for its garden regeneration and horticultural excellence, Trentham was recently again awarded a prestigious Gold Accolade in the annual VisitEngland Attraction Quality Scheme assessment – for the third year in a row.
For more details about visiting Trentham, see www.trentham.co.uk.