With a newly created garden, it’s not always easy to ensure a riot of colour in the initial stages. To help things along, we have enlisted a little help from a remarkably colourful male pheasant. Well in fact there are two and they are often seem strutting around the garden while people are working there. I think they are suitably impressed with things – well they spend plenty of time there. They are melanistic – basically meaning a very dark form – but exactly the same species as you normally see.
Have you seen a pheasant like this elsewhere?
If you manage to get to the Garden in the summer, do look out for them!
The fine weather of the last few weeks has really helped everyone involved make some stunning progress in transforming the site. Mind you Shirley is already concerned about it being too dry for the newly planted shrubs etc to get established. There’s never a happy medium is there!
Anyway the Garden has come on in leaps and bounds and every time I visit, I am more and more thrilled at how it’s all coming together. Next month we will be welcoming visitors to the Garden and I am sure they will be amazed at the transformation of what had been a neglected little plot of land for a few years.
The area around Flatford is just a magical place for wildlife. Aren’t we lucky to have been left the Old Tea Gardens, right in the midst of such a haven?
The sun and warmth of the last week have put a spring in my step and on my last visit to Flatford last week to see how the creation of a Wildlife Garden was going, was rewarded with at least two Chiffchaffs singing in the garden and a Swallow hunting overhead. With the resident tits, finches and other familiar birds, it was a riot of bird song. I can't wait for my next opportunity to visit!