As the curtain has come down on this year’s Open Garden Programme, officials at the Barbados Horticultural Society are keeping their fingers crossed they will get good rain in time for next year’s.
Programme coordinator Shirley-Anne Howell told Heather-Lynn’s Habitat the quality of this year’s gardens was due, in no small part, to the rains in the early part of this year.
“We were lucky because we had some nice rain in January and early February and that helped tremendously,” she said.
This year, the Horticultural Society fell short by two gardens in March before it closed out its programme with a tour of the expansive garden/garden shop of Nature Care in Lowlands, Christ Church.
Requires a lot of work
Howell said the society would try for a full programme in 2019.
“The difficulty is getting people who are willing to spend the money and the time getting their gardens ready.
“A house is different because a house is there. All you have to do is make sure it’s clean and tidy,” she said of those who open their houses for show.
“But a garden requires a lot of work and you are dependent on whether you have irrigation or not, and whether the rain has been good to you. So I would like to think we will have some more rain like we did, in the early part of this year, in the early part of next year, and that we can have the gardens again.”
Timed opening
Howell added this year’s attendance was good and the gardens were well received.
She was speaking as hundreds of visitors walked through the Nature Care property. Its managing director Russell Corrie said the business specially timed the opening of its pond to coincide with its Open Garden debut.
“What we have done is, we have just opened up a new section of the garden to enhance the bistro that we have. So we have created this garden around the pond and we just opened it.”
The pond comes complete with its own ducks and even turtles, which played peekaboo with visitors that Sunday.
“When we developed this part of the garden centre, we had to store a lot of water,” Corrie said of the pond which holds a quarter-million gallons of water.
“It looks shallow but it’s ten feet deep. We had put this in as an irrigation pond, but when we were doing that, we realised we were going to have a big body of water. And then we decided we can put plants and fish in it.” (HLE)
