April 9, 2013 – Lucid Gypsy

Buckland Abbey is on the far west of Dartmoor and spring is late this year. It isn’t a garden with herbaceous border, more formal and functional elegance and sweeping grounds. There is an Elizabethan garden and although it’s box hedges have been damaged by blight in recent years, it has been replanted. The National trust have been working to establish a flowery mead since 2001 and its wild flowers attract butterflies and moths. Each September the mead is cut and to maintain the low nutrients in the soil that grassland needs the cuttings are rmeoved. In day gone by these cutting would have been animal fodder and also strewn around the floor in the house for its sweet fragrance.