Heroes orchard in Grantham given clean bill of health one year on Published: 09:00, 05 March 2021
Trees in Granthamâs Heroes Commemorative Orchard have passed their first annual inspection with flying colours, with three benches now installed for contemplative viewing.
Ollie Ryan-Moore, from Easton Walled Gardens, met volunteers from Wyndham Park Forum, who manage the orchard, to check the condition of the fruit trees one year after their planting and advise on early pruning.
Only one tree, an American maple paying tribute to the American contribution locally during the Second World War, will have to be replaced following damage during a delayed lockdown delivery.
Travelling around Britain isn’t always cheap. But there are ways you can keep the cost down
Holidays on home soil are likely to be the first we can take this year. Alas, travelling around Britain isn’t always cheap. But there are ways you can keep the cost down.
You can legally wild camp in Scotland and Dartmoor, or stay in a mountain bothy for free (when covid rules allow; mountainbothies.org.uk). And then there’s camping, of course: last year, on a three-day walk from my front door, I paid £7.50 a night, cooked couscous on my stove and spent a fiver on the bus back home. That might not be everyone’s idea of a bargain – some might prefer, say, access to a shower – but I felt I got a lot of experience for my money. And that’s perhaps the way to judge a British break; not on cost, but on value.
Blossoming snowdrop flowers (Galanthus) stand in Gador
Credit: Tibor Rosta
These early flowering spring bulbs were probably the first flowers I identified. I was a very short-sighted child – and as a consequence was often flat on my face. My mother thought I was just extraordinarily clumsy.
I will always love snowdrops but, as Anna Pavord points out, to be a snowdrop buff you need special qualities: “A circulation system of cast iron and brilliant eyesight.” Perhaps because I have neither, the big white sheets of “ordinary” snowdrops (Galanthus nivalis), are still my favourites.
Our family lived in the Cotswolds near Bath, and grassy banks with limy soil encouraged the “native” G. nivalis to flourish and make large drifts. It is now thought that it is not really native but has naturalised, having arrived around the 1500s.