I had a lovely early morning walk around our local woodland earlier today, the hard overnight frost and an air temperature of -1c meant the ground was nice and firm and crisp to walk on. The weather forecast for the rest of the day looked good so after breakfast I packed the car and headed north up the A1 for our first visit of the year to the gardens at RHS Harlow Carr on the outskirts of Harrogate.

It was 10.30am as we arrived in the car park, my first job was to pop into Betty’s café for a takeaway coffee before heading next door to the gardens ticket office. After showing our passes we headed outside, down the slope to the gardens, the usual paved steps had been cordoned off due to the overnight frost and ice that was still lying about. The sun was shining, there was a lovely blue sky but a bitterly cold northwest wind, I was pleased we had a coffee with us as the warmth from the drink kept your hands nice and warm, albeit for a few minutes until we had finished the coffee!

We followed our usual route towards the sunken Victorian garden but stopped off to have a look around the ‘Learning Centre library’, where they had a display of some fine embroidery.  After leaving the library we headed down towards the QM lake, the area around the Sunken gardens had been cordoned off due to the ongoing construction work on the new footbridge across the corner of the lake. From a distance the actual footbridge looked in place, the work being carried out was to landscape the surrounding area and establish a new path to the bridge. After leaving the lake we continued along the ‘Streamside walk’ towards the ‘Old Bath House’.

A lot of work was being carried out around the gardens by contractors, volunteers and staff alike including tree felling and pruning, we stopped for a few moments to watch as they topped out several trees, working from the top of a ‘cherry picker’ it looked quite precarious, but is one of the jobs that needs doing this time of year.

The overnight frost was still lingering on the sheltered areas around the gardens, the low winter sun being unable to penetrate through the trees, leaving a white blanket of frost on these sheltered sites which looked quite picturesque, especially with the sun shining and a lovely cloudless blue sky. We continued our walk alongside the stream stopping every now and then to chat to some of the volunteers busily weeding and pruning between the shrubs alongside the stream.

We called into the ‘Old Bath House’ to have a look at the Japanese shop/exhibition that was currently on show, with products sourced from all over Japan. There was an extensive collection of Japanese gifts including stunning silk kimonos, traditional wooden Kokeshi Dolls, exquisite Japanese tableware, beautiful Japanese art prints, and much more. The exhibition/shop is here till the 19th March 2023.

After leaving the ‘Old Bath house’ we continued our walk along the opposite side of the stream till we branched off left and climbed up the slope to the ‘Sandstone Rock Garden’, both the ponds were iced over and looked to have been so for the past week. We turned left at the top of the slope and made our way to the garden centre and gift shop. After another browse, we left the warmth of the shop and made our way back outside and headed for Betty’s restaurant. Since they decided to remove the café part of Bettys (Post covid pandemic) and make it a full restaurant we have hardly visited due to the lengthy queues and wait to get a table, which is often forty minutes or more at times, today there was only four couples waiting so we decided to join the queue, needless to say we still had a twenty minute wait till we were shown to our table, anyway, after a very pleasant brunch and lovely courteous staff we headed for home after a very pleasant couple of hours looking around the gardens.