Lime Blossom Days – Vyvyan Terrace Communal Garden

Yesterday afternoon

Lesley and I

stood in the private communal garden in

one of Bristol’s leafiest squares

Elegant Vyvyan Terrace to our left,

and dead ahead the spire of Christ Church, Clifton:

The Cedar Tree

You have to think we have the toughest job in the world!

Sun, beauty all around us and the all pervasive, overwhelming smell of the two million lime blossoms overhead:

Lime blossom

The garden’s two most distinguished trees are the Cedar you have already seen and the Weeping Silver Lime below:

Tilia tomentosa ‘Petiolaris’ – Weeping Silver Lime

How do you describe a scent? Our reactions to scent are of course very personal. Our likes, our dislikes and even our ability to nasally perceive them.

And yet scent is a crucial garden asset.

Our expectations follow our eyes and prompt an instant extension of the hand and drop of the head to drink in a fragrance.

I have a yellow day lily like that flowering at the moment – its fragrance as intense, heady and lily-like as its elegant reflexed petals. I reach for a bloom to smell each time I pass.

But here the scent wafted everywhere.

For me it is aromatically dry hay, sweetened with honey and spiked with cleaner almost citrusy notes.

Its a back-of-the-throat, in-the-head, live-with-it-for-24-hours still-smelling-it stuff.

It is also a memory and a very local memory.

Because twenty five years ago as a student I lived in Vyvyan Terrace in one of the first floor rooms behind Lesley in this pic:

My room faced the square and the garden and come high summer the scent of lime blossom billowed in through the open sash window as I sat at my desk…. and studied.

Cough, cough (through scepticism not lime blossom!)

Several careers later I find myself  designing gardens with Lesley, standing in the same square, drinking in the lime blossom again.

And what would we be doing here? I mean it looks fabulous.

Well the committee who watches over it, think it can be ‘fabulouser’ still.

And we agree.

We have been commissioned to review its current state, its trees, shrubs, herbaceous plants and its layout.

 

And moving on to provide a plan for the future as to:

• Care and health issues
• Noise and privacy issues
• Improving its wildlife value
• Enhancing the use of the area by children
• Rejuvenating  the shrub collection
• Future Tree planting
• Design modifications

Needless to say any changes must be sensitive to a much loved space whose open and peaceful essence must be retained.

An interesting project!

And another Lime Blossom Day for me.

R

Tags: Lime Blossom, Tilia tomentosa 'Petiolaris', Vyvyan terrace

Category: Design Bites, Project Updates, Reviews of Gardens and Shows, The Planty Stuff