Friends Of The Hollies

The weather treated us very kindly and lots of volunteers turned up to help. We made great progress clearing heavily overgrown areas where shrubs and Spring bulbs are in danger of being swamped. Our final session for the year takes place on Sat 13 December and will include homemade mincepies!

Future dates:

We meet on the second Saturday of the month at 10am in the Hollies car park. We’re hoping to come up with a system for guiding latecomers to the area we have chosen to focus on for the morning’s work.

In October our main focus was to clear the very much overgrown poppy path just below Blacksmiths. With the help of new volunteers we made good progress. The pathways can be quite unsafe for visitors when uncleared. There’s likely to be a range of tasks to complete in November including removing some of the thick growth that might obstruct viewing of the many types of Winter and Spring bulbs.

Meet at 10am in the Hollies car park . Refreshments as always at 1200.

Our last session for the year will be taking place on Sat 13 December

After a superb growing period during Spring and Summer the Hollies will be ready for some care and attention during Autumn to ensure that the Winter bulbs and shrubs are at their best. As usual, we will meet in the Hollies car park at 10am and work through to refreshments at 12 noon. Tools and gloves are provided but if you have your own gloves please bring them.

Autumn sessions are :

13 September , 11 October , 8 November and 13 December 2025.

Thanks to everyone who came along to help clear a very congested pathway near to the Whale rock. The brambles in this area haven’t been cleared for many years and have been swamping a beautiful area of the Hollies where Butterbur flower at this time of the year.

Our next work day is on 12 April , watch this space for details on the planned tasks. The session in May is going to be a plant sale.

The weather forecast is looking good and there’s plenty to do. All the Spring bulbs are showing their heads and with the great work done by the scout group last time, the pathways around the Blacksmiths Forge area are in much better condition.

There’s still plenty of to do ! Hope you can join us at 10am in the car park.

Just reminding everyone that we will be meeting in the car park at 10am on Saturday 8th Feb for our first work session for 2025. Apologies for having to cancel the January session.

We will be continuing our work in the Blacksmith’s Forge area aiming to remove the thick growth of Enchanters Nightshade. This will hopefully mean that the bulbs will look their best when they emerge in Spring. Please come along to help if you can. Photos are on Facebook.

Many thanks to everyone who came along to help on Saturday 8th June. This time we worked on the Philadelphus border where weeds were running rampant. The Hollies collection of Philadelphus are part of the National Collection. To complement the beauty of these lovely shrubs, a range of woodland wildflowers and selected perennials have been included in the border.

The next Hollies session will be taking place on Saturday 7th September 2024.

Thanks to everyone who came along to help out, we had a great session tackling the well established brambles just below the big Cedar tree. Photos are posted on Facebook to show before and after. you’ll be able to see some lovely Spring bulbs just about to come into flower.

Our next sessions are on Sat 9th March 2024 and Sat 13th April from 10am to 12 noon.

Watch out for details of our plant sale in May.

Thanks to everyone who helped out on November 11th.

We had a great turn out of volunteers and a very productive morning working at the Forge adjacent to the Blacksmith’s Area. The weeding and clearing is in preparation for a good showing of the Spring bulbs and we are hoping to introduce some interesting shrubs during the Winter months. Once again the before and after photos show a great deal of progress.

There’s plenty to do on the 9th December, so please come along and help if you can.

As usual gardening tools are provided but feel free to bring your own – don’t forget the gardening gloves and sturdy footwear.

Refreshments will be provided when we finish.

Future dates are as follows at 10am on the second Saturday of each month:

Saturday December 9th

Saturday January 13th 2024

Saturday February 10th

Saturday March 9th