“We’ve created a winter wonderland” Grow foolproof crops
A swirling sea of crocus and snowdrops greets visitors to this well-organised Herefordshire garden
As soon as you arrive at Ivy Croft it’s obvious that this is a wellordered plot. The pleached limes, underplanted with neatly clipped box, are the epitome of perfection along the drive. Here there’s a bell to alert owners Sue and Roger Norman to the fact a visitor has arrived. Don’t expect them to emerge from the house though – they’ll either be in the garden or working in the barn. “We garden nearly all day, every day,” says Sue. Over the past 20 years Sue and Roger have transformed their former smallholding into a garden that’s famous for its snowdrops. They also run a nursery from the garden, and in February it’s alive with activity as gardeners from all over the region come to invest in snowdrops. “The garden is our hobby, our passion and our workplace,” says Roger. “When we first arrived, there was no garden here at all – just a couple of plastic pots outside formal framework (clockwise from above) The formal front garden is home to a shaggy golden Chamaecyparis pisifera ‘Filifera Aurea’, Acer griseum, white birch and clipped box; snowdrop Galanthus nivalis sandersii Group with red-berried Ruscus aculeatus; in the display beds all 200 galanthus cultivars are carefully labelled; a regiment of box balls and pleached limes line the drive INSeT Galanthus nivalis ‘merlin’
the front door. The property appealed to us because the land was so flat. Our previous garden was very steep, and Sue was concerned about how we would garden there as we got older.” Today the garden at Ivy Croft is in its prime. The formal front garden is home to pyramid box that stand to attention on either side as you walk down the path. “We clip the box in August and do very little else to it,” says Sue. “We think that our open site here makes them less prone to box blight as there’s plenty of air circulating around them.”
“In February the nursery is alive with activity as people come to invest in snowdrops”