The original owners of Petra Hoyer Millar’s garden in Adderbury, North Oxfordshire loved their vegetables. In fact, they loved them so much that they created an enormous four acre vegetable plot and had the produce ferried up to their London lodgings when they were away. They stocked the gardens with up to 15 members of staff to tend them.
Nowadays, Petra and her husband tend the gardens with the help of a part-time gardener, but there seems to have been no dip in productivity.
The vegetable garden is crammed with kale, rhubarb, peas, chard, onions, garlic, asparagus, espaliered apples and plenty more produce, while the gardens start daintily with primroses and daffodils blooming in the ha-ha, and work themselves up to a fever pitch of peonies, roses and lavender.
Later in the year, the greenhouse borders come into their own with late-flowering plants.
The garden also includes a croquet lawn, a rose walk, meadow, Victorian greenhouses in the walled garden, herbaceous borders and a fruit garden. Beautifully ancient espaliered apple trees – thought to be around 100 years old – are among the plants that Petra and her husband cherish as they go about their gardening.
If you want to follow Petra as she gardens in her beautiful seven-acre plot, start reading her marvellous blog.
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