Vanessa Cook an inspiring 80-year-old with a lifetime of expertise in horticulture, put to amazing use in her four-acre gardens near York, Stillingfleet Lodge Gardens. Her garden nursery celebrates its 40th anniversary this year.
Video Shot for the Yorkshire Post by Bruce Rollinson
Video Shot for the Yorkshire Post by Bruce Rollinson
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00I'm Vanessa Cook and I live at Stillingfleet Lodge garden and we run a garden that's open
00:17to the public and we have a nursery where we grow lots of interesting plants.
00:21I'm sitting at the moment in the front garden which was the first bit of the garden that
00:26we ever developed.
00:28When we bought the house in 1975 it was a very run down house in a grass field.
00:35There were no trees here at all and there was certainly no garden and for the first
00:40year we lived in a caravan, we did up the house and we planted a shelter belt which
00:46we now grandly call the woodland walk but actually it's the one thing that protects
00:51us from the very strong west winds and allows us to have a garden here at all.
00:56To begin with for the first ten years we were here we were the good life I think.
01:02We had a house cow, we had pigs, we had sheep, we had chickens and geese and we grew all
01:09our own vegetables and we certainly didn't have a garden and we wanted to bring up our
01:15children to realise how important it was to be organic and for fifty years we've been
01:22here we have been totally organic.
01:26We're very lucky because we have chickens in the garden so when people come round the
01:29garden they say how can you possibly be organic when all your hostas haven't got holes in
01:35them.
01:36Well that's because we've got guinea fowl and chickens all over the garden and they
01:40are my slug pellets I think.
01:42Since the first ten years we were here from then I went to Ascombe Brown and did my three
01:48years horticulture and then I started a very small nursery which seemed to get bigger and
01:56bigger unexpectedly and we then started developing the garden so that I had more plants from
02:03which to grow plants to sell in the nursery because here we buy in very very little plants
02:09nearly all of it is grown from plants we have got growing here which means if you come to
02:14look at the garden you can see a plant in the garden you can go to the nursery and you
02:18can buy it and if it's pouring with rain you can go in the cafe and have wonderful
02:23homemade cakes very good coffee and have a lovely time just having a peaceful tranquil
02:29time in a typical English country garden.