Blakenham Woodland Garden is a delightful combination of traditional English woodland and many exotic trees, shrubs and flowers planted over a period of 50 years.
From early daffodils and drifts of bluebells to rare magnolias and camellias the garden offers an ever-changing pattern of colours and scents throughout spring and early summer.
Blakenham Woodland Garden is near Ipswich in Suffolk, just a short drive from the A14 and A12 trunk roads.
History of the Garden The Garden Today
The next generation has brought new interests and directions. Michael Blakenham is a life long environmentalist and was Chairman of the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew as well as Chairman of the RSPB He has increased the stock of unusual specimens and has bought many rare and sometimes even unnamed trees and shrubs at Kew auctions. His wife is an artist and potter and is closely connected with Maggies Centres, an innovative family of cancer caring centres, now springing up all over the United Kingdom. Her interest is in creating an atmosphere with light and shade, layered texture, and surprise in which people can feel happy and enchanted.
The new management of the garden tries to strike a balance between what is cultivated and what is wild. The natural ground cover of the woodland floor is allowed to make its own decisions as much as possible. It is a difficult balance to strike. Sometimes it looks as if the battle has been completely lost or won, depending how you look at it, to wilderness.
The birds sing blithely in the branches above bluebells and then campion and foxgloves in their turn. Magnolias and cornus, azalea and roses flourish. There seems nothing particularly incongruous with their sharing the stage with exotics like bamboo and phormium and other rarities collected in recent Kew expeditions overseas. The profusion of planting is interspersed with Chinese rocks, rustic huts and hybrid sculpture benches from which to enjoy the turn of another path. At the heart of the wood is a surprise. Within a serendipitous circle of tall sycamores a tilting grass landform spirals down into a chalk plug hole. Even the badgers have their own dell. It is never dull, even after the exuberance of spring has passed and summer has moved on to late summer when there is little in flower but calming shades of green and alternating light and shade.