Where do you get inspiration for the garden?

From the garden. Everything about Acorn Bank has a magical atmosphere to it. It seems to be a real oasis for nature, surrounded by lots of countryside but sometimes, particularly during droughts, the local countryside becomes less useful for particularly invertebrates. That’s when you see invertebrates coming into the garden more than usual, so it’s lovely to see the garden being used that way and that makes us want to do more and more, so that’s where the inspiration comes from.

Which flowers do you like best in the garden?

You can’t ask a gardener that question, it changes every day! If we’re talking about supporting biodiversity, then I particularly love anything that isn’t a cultivar, all the native species. And the herb garden here is full of those. Out of 275 different plants, I think there might be one cultivar in there, and the rest of them are species, not all of them native. They are from all over the world but because of that, the herb garden often feels like it’s buzzing, it feels alive. There’s a lot more going on insect-wise in the herb garden than in other parts of the garden. 

I’m aware there’s a bit of a debate about native versus non-native for supporting invertebrates, but from what I’ve read and learned from discussing it with other people, it seems the native argument is strongest if you’re talking about butterflies and moths (lepidoptera) and other insects, as long as they can get in there, it’s useful and doesn’t matter where it’s from in the world, so on that basis it seems to work. 

We have a member of staff here, Nick, who is the Cumbria bee and wildlife recorder and he spends quite a lot of his time photographing bugs, bees, wasps and so on, and there was one summer where he recorded over 50 species of bees and wasps – just within the walled garden. 

What tips do you have for other gardeners?

The big one is not to be too tidy, and to allow your garden to be relaxed. I think something that has come through really strongly to me over the last year and a half is the importance of not just diversity of life but diversity of habitat, so within the garden try to create a mosaic of different types of opportunities for different insects to take advantage of, and birds and all kinds of life. 

We have stone walls, we have long grass, short grass, bare soil, we have mole hills that we rake flat, we have a variety of different flowers that flower at different times of year so that you’re supporting pollinators for as long a season as possible, so it’s about that variety and diversity so you’re not just homing in on one aspect of the wildlife that’s out there, but you’re supporting as much as possible. 

Use perennials wherever possible. We only have a couple of container plants, which we take out in winter and look after them, then put them back the following summer.

Change to battery machinery instead of petrol, and only use it when necessary.

Which is your favourite part of the garden?

I think that depends on the time of year and the time of day. First thing in the morning, when I arrive at 8 o’clock, if you go out into the sunken garden and the sun is just rising and it’s just got above the garden wall, there’s a wonderful atmosphere in there, it’s just peaceful and still. 

In the middle of winter, I love the herb garden the best because it’s by far the most formal area, it’s got laid out beds with a very clear shape and structure, and the beds are all edged with stone which has moss growing on it and the moss glows in the middle of winter. It’s the only time of year where you can see the layout and structure of the garden because all the herbaceous planting is cut down so you can see the length of the garden. 

I suppose I have to say the orchard at this time of year, September and October. Although, this year the fruit is all ripening early, we’ve been harvesting for a good week or two already. 

What wildlife do you get currently?

We have a huge range of pollinating insects, from 50 different species of bees and wasps, and there’s loads of hoverflies. We have great crested newts, in fact all three species of British native newts. We have a healthy bird population, some seen all year and other summer visitors. Many of these nest on the property, including great spotted woodpecker, nuthatch, treecreeper, buzzard, robin, blackbird, song thrush, chiffchaff, willow warbler, redstart and yellowhammer.

Lots of small furry creatures that probably do more harm than good, but we tolerate them. Lots of moles which we don’t deal with in any form, just rake the mole hills flat. We get the odd red squirrel, badgers, otters in the woodland. The river running through the woodland has white-clawed crayfish, eels and fish. 

How do you attract/look after the wildlife?

We’re in the middle of a Riverlands project which is removing an old concrete weir on the Crowdundle Beck and replacing it with a 50m boulder rapid. The weir is preventing species from passage upstream, so it’s re-naturalising that a bit at the same time as maintaining the function of the weir, which was to allow it to create a head of water that can be abstracted for the mill to carry on milling. So, the solution is a huge boulder rapid, which will create pools instead of a sudden drop off.

It’s a slightly holistic picture, because we’re looking at not just habitats, but horticulture has a bit of a bad reputation when it comes to wildlife, so it’s trying to address that as much as possible. Not just here, but influencing other people to do the same thing. So, for example, we don’t use chemicals in the garden, or pesticides. 

We also look after the soil, so although on the surface it doesn’t necessarily look like you’re doing that for wildlife, it’s kind of the foundation for everything else. If you’ve got a healthy soil, that’s full of life in itself and that life supports the rest of the food chain, so we do that through effective composting and regular mulching, but then we also make sure we’re not using plastics unless we absolutely have to. We have got water in the garden already because we have a pond.

We allow a lot of our grass to grow long, and not just for May. This is something that we’ve always done. The walled garden is mostly fruit trees, and below the fruit trees we let the grass grow long until at least the middle of August, at which point we cut it so we can get in and harvest the fruit but it is long for most of the year.

To deter wasps, we use scented leaf pelargoniums on the café tables, which seem to have been working well this year. Where possible, we use natural solutions.

We have also recently planted a new stretch of woodland (estimated 2 acres) and protected it along with some existing woodland from human interference by not including it in the visitor route.

What steps do you take to keep it ‘tidy’ whilst being wildlife-friendly?

I would say tidiness is overrated, but there are little tips and tricks you can do to make the garden look like somebody loves it. For example, where we have the long grass, we mow a strip around the edge so that long grass looks deliberate. It looks like a choice, rather than that somebody just couldn’t be bothered to do anything about it. The herbaceous borders are largely not staked, so in a lot of herbaceous borders you’ll see a lot of staking and supporting to keep the plants upright, we tend to plant things close enough together so they support each other but if things are going to flop, we make sure they’re planted slightly further back from the edge so they’re not hanging over the paths too much. It’s not about being tidy, it’s about making your choices look deliberate. 

We have wigwams made of dead plant material at the back of the borders, which provides wildlife with a source of shelter, food and nesting sites. We also have dead hedges which help to keep out the deer. 

What are your future plans for helping wildlife? 

We want to carry on what we’re doing, and we are in the middle of planning to contribute to the bee walk scheme at Acorn Bank, we’ve sent a member of staff on a training day so we can get a bee route up and running so we can contribute to the monitoring of bumble bees. 

One of the things we agreed to about a year ago as a team is that we would garden lightly and that we would consider every action in terms of: is it necessary? Is this the most sustainable way to do it? Is there a better way to do it? We also created a huge list of things we’d like to do, and most of them we are doing but there are some to work toward.

Something we’re going to trial this year is we have a huge number of windfalls as well as the harvested apples, so the harvested apples we pass on to visitors for a donation and that raises money for the garden but the windfalls are harder to deal with because once they are bruised, they don’t keep and we can’t really give them to visitors. We are very conscious that windfalls are popular with our butterflies and if you leave them on the ground, you get clouds of butterflies on them. It’s a beautiful sight, so we want to do that more but it’s about choosing where we let it happen. It’s not ideal on a footpath, for example, or anywhere that we mow the grass. 

We’d like to use biochar more, which is a form of charcoal which is really good for your soil. It locks up carbon but it also creates a really healthy microbial community within your soil and that’s fantastic for your plant health as well as biodiversity in the soil.

We want to get better at managing our hedgerows, the top orchard has two sides of hedge and at the minute they’re not getting laid often enough. So, we want to lay those hedges more frequently to create a really good habitat as well as keep the height under control. 

We make our own compost which we use for mulching, we sometimes buy compost in for propagation purposes, for seed sowing cuttings and at the minute that arrives in plastic bags, so we’re thinking about how we can buy it in a bulk bag instead to reduce the plastic again. 

We have got a wormery which we get a liquid feed off, but we also have a huge amount of comfrey so we need to get better at using it. At the minute, we often treat the comfrey a bit like a harvest and cut it all down and put it in the compost pile, which is great for the compost but we could also be creating a comfrey tea with that for feed. 

We do have a new native hedgerow to plant, as we’ve put a new compost area in this year. The compost area was in the woodland, so we’re between two at the minute. The new one is where we’re putting the new stuff, and when all the old compost is used up the old compost area will be dismantled and returned to woodland.