Back To Tissington

You may remember a post I wrote last year about Derbyshire Well Dressings, a custom where wells and springs are adorned with pictures made from flowers and natural materials which have been pressed into a clay base to dress the wells and give thanks for the water. We visited a few different villages last year to see their well dressings, on Sunday we decided to go back to a village we last visited in 2019 to see Tissington Well Dressing.

You can read more about Tissington if you click on the link above, I wrote about the village in my last post. You can also see how the wells were dressed five years ago, they change them each year.

There are six wells in Tissington, Hands Well, Children's Well, Hall Well, Yew Tree Well, Town Well and Coffin Well. The above is Hands Well.

It's a lovely atmosphere in the village with so many people coming to look at the well dressings. It's so well organised with a field given over to parking at a cost of just £3 per car. Tissington holds their well dressing early in the year, their tradition is to have the festival on Ascension Day. They certainly got the weather for it this year.

Children's Well.

These ducks had the right idea, taking a nap in the dappled shade of a tree.

Hall Well.

There's some pretty cottages in the village, some are holiday lets. It's a lovely part of the country to take a break with some stunning scenery a stones throw away and many places of interest in the vicinity.

Yew Tree Well.

Ornaments adorn many of the canopies over the doorways. I love the pig.

Town Well.

There were plenty of refreshment stalls as well as cafes, a plant stall as well as a nursery, a butchers shop, a candle shop, even a craft shop.

Coffin Well.

Afterwards, we made an on the spot decision to visit Ilam Park, somewhere we haven't been before. It's just across the border into Staffordshire but less than five miles from Tissington so it wasn't far to go.

Ilam Park is owned by the National Trust. It covers 158 acres and consists of Ilam Hall, the remnants of its gardens and woodland.

I love this time of year when everywhere is so green. We may have had a lot of rain in April but it's made for a lush May when the sunshine has arrived.

We watched the lambs with their mums.

Holy Cross Church stands in the grounds of Ilam Park, set amid beautiful scenery.

I enjoyed seeing the planting combinations in the borders. The purples looked pretty side by side with the oranges.

We stopped off in Ilam where the cottages resemble a Swiss village.

It was a lovely day out. Yew Tree Well is my favourite well dressing. Which is yours?

In My Garden

I'm not sowing many seeds this year, in fact the only seeds I've bought are Tigerella tomato and sunflower Rouge Royale.

I always used to start my sowing much earlier than May but with a cold rainy April, I just couldn't motivate myself this year. In fact, I'm not even sure I'm going to sow the tomatoes as I saw that a local garden centre had some heritage tomato plants, I may pop back and buy a couple of those. There's so many interesting tomato varieties that it's nice to try something new.

We've done quite a bit of garden centre visiting just lately and we've made a few purchases too, they're not all shown here. The better weather has encouraged lots of garden activity. I've bought some plants to plug gaps in the flower border as well as others to put in pots. I'm not a huge lover of bedding plants but they have their place. We've also bought a tree, rowan Joseph Rock. Its leaves turn a flame red in autumn and it produces amber yellow berries. We've got an ornamental cherry tree in the front garden at the moment but it's diseased so we're going to replace it with this.

Mick bought me a plant stand for Christmas so I'm enjoying filling that with an assortment of different pots and plants. There's still space for more.

We've bought a few of these metal planters to hang on the fence. I've filled them with violas and lobelia as they'll be emptied at the end of summer and stored away to prevent them from rusting. Who knows, they may rust anyway being outdoors in our British summer. Time will tell.

Of course, if I'm trying to get some photos of the garden then Archie is going to photobomb them!

I have a few different areas in the garden where I group pots together. Here at the side of my bench I have an acer, a pieris, a pot filled with strawberry plants, a dahlia and a sedum.

We're lucky to have a nice outdoor space. I think many people came to realise during the pandemic that a garden can be a haven and though our garden is now smaller than the one we left behind two years ago, it's still a good sized space, big enough for us, and we enjoy being in it when the sun puts in an appearance.