Garden 7
Acheron Park, Buxton
Julie Foletta

The feature of the farm garden at Acheron Park is its heritage trees and their magnificent trunks including cedars, cypress, maples, cratageas.
Many trees were planted in the thirties and forties as part of a much larger Acheron Park than you see today.
The driveway is lined with massive high maintenance Monterey cypress; in the house garden are some towering rhododendrons and spring flowering trees and shrubs including dogwood, horse chestnut and wisteria
Having survived years of drought with minimal water, then spared damage by the 2009 fires, rain brought new growth and a glorious display last spring.
Specimen trees such as the cypress, pin oak, claret and golden ash, maples and cedars were planted in the 1940s, the rhododendrons and camellias in the 1960s.
Of special note is an Atlas cedar, a fifty year old Chinese dogwood, a huge Monterey cypress and a towering multi-trunked white pearl rhododendron. In winter and early spring the garden comes alive with flowering bulbs include daffodils, jonquils, snowflakes, lechenalia, bluebells, hyacinths and freesias.
The bearded iris have been thinned and replanted earlier this year. Some flowering perennials, including forget me not, purple granny's bonnets, hellebores, lychnis and iris, took up residence about 50 years ago - and return year after year. Beds of rich leaf litter provide an environment for seed germination of resident plants.
The perfume of lily of the valley, jasmine, viburnum and wisteria fill the air.
A recent shady under-planting of Japanese maples has been interspersed with shade and semi-shade loving plants; and a small native garden is establishing at the home gate.
Some overcrowding has resulted with a number of trees growing much too large for their present location, others create headaches with regular broken limbs.