This is Hoveringham

Hoveringham Open Gardens

Hoveringham Village Open Day - 23rd June

1.The Nook
A charming cottage garden with flower meadow and herbaceous border.

2. Birch End
A recently establised cottage style plant persons garden packed with colour and variety including roses, clematis and other climbers. It has fine views of Kneeton and the Trent Valley.

3. Weavers Cottage
This garden has recently won "The Times" newspaper award for the "Low Maintenance Courtyard Garden" class. It has an excellent range of foliage colour and texture.

4. Riverlyn
A large traditional garden with mature trees and formal planting, combining with some delightfully subtle modern touches.

5. West Farm House
A plant persons garden with fine herbaceous border, and an extensive greenhouse collection of cacti and succulents. A wide range of hostas, hardy geraniums and penstemons.

6. Capability Barn
A developing large country garden, influenced by Capability Brown! With rockery, pool, cottage garden, ornamental grass bed and paddock areas.

Tranquil haven
By DAVID ROGERS - The Newark Adveriser

The sole aim of creating a garden for one woman was to have the time to sit and enjoy it.
Mrs Di Trendell, of Hoveringham, designed her back garden to be low-maintenance. It has also won her an award.Shortly after moving to the village Mrs Trendell attended a weekend-long garden design course to learn how to make the most of a small space.

She said one of the first jobs in her garden was to replace the grass with paving so it would not need cutting every week.Mrs Trendell then created a number of gravelled areas with a porous matting underneath to allow the rain through but to deter weeds.

Bark chippings laid around plants in raised beds also suppress weeds, and the beds are home to numerous shrubs which need only a yearly prune.A herbaceous border needs little work and includes heliotropes, alstroemeria, delphiniums and echinacea.

The border, and a Mediterranean area consisting of convolvulus and hibiscus, are divided by a lavender hedge, leading from the gated entrance to the garden, to a bench in one secluded corner.

Mrs Trendell said the bench was her favourite spot and she spent most of her time there, as well as by the table and chairs in the centre of the patio.She said: "I'm not really a gardener. I don't want to spend all of my time cutting grass. I'm more about sitting in the garden and enjoying it without worrying about what to do next."

Enjoying the garden was made much easier as the house was south facing making it a sun trap, said Mrs Trendell.She said the pond, beside a clematis- obscured brick wall, was ecologically balanced and had never needed to be cleaned out.

The only real attention Mrs Trendell gives the garden is the daily watering of the petunias, geraniums and other flowers grown in containers. She also does a spot of dead heading.The garden earned Mrs Trendell third prize in the Times' Back Garden Of The Year competition.

She was visited by the newspaper's gardening editor who spent a morning with her judging the garden's features before she was awarded an electric pruner - a prize she has scarcely used since.

ABOVE: Mrs Di Trendell relaxes in her favourite spot in her low-maintenance garden at Hoveringham.