Yeo Valley gravel garden – a little-known gem

Yeo Valley, the company that produces organic dairy products, has a gravel garden and organic cafe in the countryside south of Bristol.  It’s a beautiful, open area near Blagdon Lake.

It’s only open Thursdays and Fridays from 29th April to Sept 30th – but it’s worth diarising a visit.  It’s £5 entry.  A few plants are for sale in the car park, and there is a great little ‘car garden’ as you go in:

There are veg beds near the cafe, growing what’s needed for lunch:

and some of the growing techniques are ingenious.  Wool from their sheep is used to keep out slugs:

Below this are herb beds and one of the several wrought iron sculptures that are integrated into the gardens.

The place is pretty child-friendly, with a little grass garden and a straw bale maze:

OK, now (after a nice quiche lunch) on to the main garden.  A pair of fiery beds follow the veg beds, with a nice combination of deep red dahlias, day lilies, crocosmia ‘Lucifer’ and pittosporum ‘Tom Thumb’ with its deep purple older leaves and lime green new shoots.

Then to the main gravel garden, constructed with gentle hillocks and island beds which one walks over and round.

Some lovely agastache in the foreground, with the blue globes of echinops behind:

Terrible photo below but verbascums nicely contrasting with a haze of pale purple verbena bonariensis:

Contrasting shrubs in flower – a hydrangea paniculata with its conical white flowers, and berberis thunbergii ‘Rose Glow’:

And lastly, some quirky ‘accessories’:

I hope you have gained some ideas out of this post, even if you haven’t got such a huge space to fill.  If you want to buy some late summer plants like these, now is a good time to establish them in your garden before the winter, so they have a head start in spring.

Tagged as: garden visit, gravel garden, organic garden, organic vegetable garden, planting, south-west England