Late Summer at Calke Abbey

It's getting towards autumn, but there's still plenty of warm sunshine around so late last week we took ourselves off for a wander round Calke Abbey's gardens.

They're situated a way from the house in an area which would have had huge kitchen gardens providing fruit and vegetables for the big house, and there's still a large vegetable patch to explore (with weird shaped pumpkins, and a scarecrow to keep away the birds), and the multitude of sheds which once stored  equipment, or housed boilers, or housed the garden pony.









The flower gardens have a mix of loose informal sowings, and more rigid bedding - all still flowering well (unlike my own garden)

Scarecrows guard the crops - hopefully keeping birds away, but presumably not butterflies or aphids against which these cabbages have been netted.

 There are always so many details among the sheds and stores that I haven't noticed before - a lucky horseshoe, peeling plaster, a plant taken root in an old wall, the pattern on a drain cover ...

Wandering down to the old ice house, a view opens up of Staunton Harold reservoir

The best part of the day though was finding some of the resident deer calmly grazing close to the garden fence, paying no attention whatsoever to the visitors busy with their cameras