Avenues Open Gardens, 2014

Every year a number of houses in The Avenues area of Hull fling open their gates and invite in all and sundry to peruse their gardens to raise money for a huge range of charities, this year it was Dove House Hospice. A charity providing community care for people with life limiting illnesses. You buy a map of the gardens and the money goes to the charity, some householders were also selling items ranging from plants to cakes through to books and bric a brak. This year the Avenues Open Gardens fell on Sunday the 6th and 13th of July 2014. There's a lot of gardens to see with some being open one of the days and others both. I previously blogged about it in 2012 but seem to have missed last years. This year with a friends small child in tow we only got round about a quarter of the gardens.

This tree sculpture is a tribute to St Cuthbert.
It was carved in 2006.

As well as nice big Victorian houses and fountains The Avenues has a number of adult trees. Unfortunately over the years some of these have died back. From 1999  number were turned into a collection of sculptures. Over the years their numbers have dropped as they've to decayed or been unexpectedly chopped down by the council and the last few are expected to be removed and sold off at some point.

Coleus

 There's usually a few interesting things to see in the various gardens. I can't recall what was in each garden at the moment but in the first was a rather impressive 18 year old bonsai tree, and a number of brightly coloured Coleus. One garden had a large hole with the legs of a mannequin sticking out from the shrubbery in it. I'd guess it was possibly a pond at some point but liked it's current jaunty crime scene look - which to be honest you just don't see that often.

Old beehive tucked away

It wasn't long before I spotted an old beehive at the side of a garden. It wasn't in use but the lady of the house used to keep bees in the past. I'm not entirely sure what type of hive it is with the lip on the edge of each box. It may be some variation of the William Burroughs Carr Hive with straight instead of sloping sides in which case these would be lifts that go on the outside of the boxes containing the bees, otherwise I suspect once propolised those boxes would be very difficult to separate.

This? It's called um.. Red Flower I think.

Some of the gardens had obviously had a lot of time spent on them by folk who evidently knew what they were doing and what they were planting. The striking red flowering plant above is probably a Crocosmia Lucifer, according to the picture recognition wonders of Google Image Search.

Flock of Metal Birds

The Mushrooms and the Ivy

It's often interesting to see what people use to decorate their gardens and the range included chimney pots, wooden pails, a couple of flocks of metal birds, various ceramics, a huge ancient flag, random bits of metal and wood ware and I'm pretty sure I saw a ships figurehead at one point.

Wildlife pond

There was an abundance of water features ranging from fountainy things and waterfalls to fish ponds and wildlife ponds. Some were tucked away whilst others were focal points. There's certainly a lot of frogs living in the Avenues' gardens.

This one? Pink Flower. Definitely Pink Flower.

I thought this shed was fantastic

There were some unusual constructions in stone, wood and metal including the shed/arbour/summerhouse combination above.

WBC Hive

There's another beekeeper in the avenues and I had a look at his apiary. He's still making hive boxes from reclaimed wood. He also makes his own wax foundation which he said saves him a lot of money. Wax foundation is basically a sheet of wax beekeepers give to bees to kick start the comb building and help control where they build it. Most small scale beekeepers buy it ready made and it needs replacing every few years. He mentioned that two of his five colonies were queenless at the time. One of mine was queenless at the time too so it was good to know that even with over thirty years experience it's not always avoidable. He showed me some wax queen cells he'd made from a wooden mold, basically 4 rounded dowels protruding from a base which are dipped in wax. They looked like bullet casings but apparenty the bees like them. I've used the Jenter system myself which consists of plastic cups and metal tubes to make artifical queen cells and I can imagine the ones made from wax are more readily accepted by the bees. I'm not sure how they work but I'd assume they can be stocked with an egg or grub by a beekeeper or the bees themselves may move a viable egg into the cup if they're in the mood.

Pokker

The last garden I looked at was home to a couple of recently arrived chickens. I'm not sure what breed they are, Barnvelders possibly, but they were very different to my Hybrids and Calder Ranger. Despite the size when I first looked at the run I actually missed them as their colouration was similar to the soil they were scratching in. One of them spotted my camera phone and posed long enough to get a headshot.