19 Feb National Open Gardens

The Gate

Sunday, 26th April
1:00pm – 5:00pm
Winchcombe, Gloucestershire, GL54 5PS

Compact cottage style garden planted with a colourful display of tulips in spring, and with perennials, annuals and climbers in the walled courtyard of C17 former coaching inn. Also a separate, productive, walled kitchen garden with espaliers and other fruit trees.

Although small, this garden has layers of interest, especially early in the season for which the owners plant several hundred bulbs, majoring on tulips. The changes are rung every year, and the colourful tulip display is complemented by late daffodils and by early peonies, alliums and euphorbia. The walled garden around the house was once the stable yard of the coaching inn, and the planting is designed around an ancient lilac tree, in bloom in late April/early May. There is a separate walled vegetable garden with greenhouse and espaliered apple trees. Part of its charm is its unexpectedness, tucked away off a busy thoroughfare in the centre of the ancient Saxon town of Winchcombe.