I always enjoy a trip out to Pocklington to have a look around the beautiful, landscaped gardens at Burnby Hall and today was no different. It is a forty five minute drive from home with the added risk of getting stuck behind slow moving agricultural traffic, fortunately todays journey was quite straight forward.

We arrived around 10.30am and the car park was already half full, forgetting of course that we are currently in the middle of the school holidays.

It was a lovely dry, and cloudy morning with the occasional sunny period, which made for a very pleasant walk.

After leaving the ticket office we made our way across the beautiful cut lawn to the water’s edge, and watched the fish as they came to say hello, or more like where is your food! Several varieties of Carp, Roach and Rudd scampered with each other in the hope that we were going to throw some fish food to them, the water was boiling with fish. We continued our walk along the water’s edge to the Dovecote, I have never seen as many doves, I counted well over twenty birds, some feeding on the lawn, others contently feeding in the security of the Dovecote itself. We continued our walk along the water’s edge, stopping every now and then to admire the water lilies in flower. After several minutes we stopped at Jamie’s Bridge to look at the view across the ponds to the rockery on the opposite bank. The water’s surface was well hidden under the mass of waterlilies. From the bridge it is just a short walk down the slope past the ancient redwood tree stump on our left, and into the Stumpery. The old stumps were awash with tree ferns, amongst them were several teddy bear picnics which added a pleasant splash of colour.

On leaving the Stumpery we followed the winding path through the Rock Garden. This part of the garden changes with every visit and is a delight to walk through, meticulously clean and tidy with all the shrubs and plants clearly marked on small slate boards under the respective plants and shrubs. A European Smoke tree caught our eye, the smoke tree is a stunning large shrub with eye-catching purple or green foliage and feathery flower clusters resembling puffs of pink smoke. Leaving the Rock Garden behind us we headed into the contemporary themed Walled Garden, which was only created in 2022, I do not know how we have missed this on previous visits, but this was my/our first visit into this part of the garden.  Ground staff were busily mowing the lawn on our visit, but the surrounding borders were full of colourful shrubs and plants, some of the highlights for me were the beautiful Martagon Lilies, the lilac-coloured Echinacea, multicoloured Marguerite Daisies, huge Alliums and the Stone Crop Sedums, to name just a few. We walked around this part of the garden twice it was so colourful. From the Walled Garden it is just a short stroll to the Lilypad café where we enjoyed a very pleasant brunch before the journey home.