Top May Plants
Irises and alliums provide the garden glitz in May. Alstroemeria fires up and lesser known stars in the borders are Libertia and Candelabra Primula
Best Garden Room
Our White Garden is a sea of tranquillity topped by a froth of self seeders such as Sweet Rocket, Jacobs Ladder and white Forget-me-not
May Hatchlings
May is the month that our tawny owl babies are encouraged to leave their owl box. Here’s one of this year’s fledglings. This one roamed around the village before returning to our maple.
Hidcote Manor is the archetypal English manor garden, good in many months.
Everything wants to greet May sunshine: the songbirds, the wild flowers in meadow and woodland and a fresh greenery that cloaks the garden and provides the backdrop to the flowers.
Top May plants
Top plants – when they flower – what they deliver to the garden
| 1. Iris Sibirica | May-June | Violet-blue streaking bullets |
| 2. Alstroemeria | May-July | Wow-factor trumpets yellow thru to red |
| 3. Alliums | May-June | Purple or white spheres |
| 4. Bearded Iris | May-June | Extravagant art dancing in the borders |
| 5. Libertia | April-June | Delicate sprays of white |
| 6. Rock Roses | May-July | Long-lasting cushions of colour |
| 7. Ceonothus | May-June | The sky climbing your walls |
| 8. Clematis President | April onwards | Dinner plates of purple |
| 9. Geum Borisii | May-June | Small scarlet explosions |
| 10. Yellow Scabious | May-June | Pale lemon bee pillows |
Iris Siberica
We rediscovered our love of Iris Sibirica around 2014 and have since built up a collection. May is its month
The White Garden
The White Garden is always a calm space to take a mug of coffee but in May it takes centre stage, so spectacular that you forget the restrained colour palate. Bushes of ostentacious cistus and drifts of the bearded iris, White Grace, are shown here. The main white bed showcases Iris Sibirica, White Swirl, white geraniums and Oriental Poppies, while Rosa White Star bounds over railings, an arch and a bower.
We try to choose our Top Ten White Plants here.
Garden Rooms in May
Hidcote Manor
Perhaps the quintessential English garden with its series of garden rooms set around a high-gabled manor of warm Cotswold stone. It has every feature you’d expect of such a garden: rose-covered walls, topiary-edged paths, the borrowed landscape, a pleached tree terrace, formal water-lily strewn ponds, boggy streams and wide pastel borders (like the one pictured here). Yes there’s a vegetable garden and, naturally, a tennis court.
A final confirmation of its association classic English style are the number of gardens staples that bear its name, plants such as: Hypericum Hidcote and the one of the two most featured forms of Lavender.
Left it’s caught in late May but it looks good almost every month.
Wild spectacle: Queen Anne's Lace
Queen Anne’s Lace, better known as Cow Parsley, washes over the nitrogen-rich verges from May and its delicate tracery sneaks around the edges of our garden
