The Last Post

2015 has been a very busy year for the Uppark Garden team.

We have been preparing and dealing with 7 day-a-week opening, building a new glasshouse, creating a flower cutting garden, providing flower arrangements for the house, thinning out the woodland trees, hedgelaying in the car park, running garden and woodland events and much more at the same time as maintaining and enhancing the Uppark Garden.

In the forth coming year we’re going to be busier than ever with plans to create a recreation area in the west copse in the south meadow, reintroduce historic garden pathways, re-sculpt the Coade Urn mound, reshape some of the island beds, plant up regenerated borders and continue our progress with renewing sections of the wide glade borders.

2015 has been another good year for the Uppark blog. We have created marginally less (33) posts in 2015 than previous years and had 13,824 viewings. For a more detailed look at our post stats check out the WordPress end of year report.

uparkgarden/2015/annual-report/

We started the Uppark Blog back in 2011 and have had a great time producing 405 posts which has generated 75,486 blog views by 23,035 visitors, from 88 countries around the world. It has far outreached our expectations.

However, the Uppark Blog no longer fits with the National Trust business model and our ongoing commitments make it more difficult for us to find the time to create new and interesting posts. So it is with much regret that we have decided to stop posting and close the blog from the start of this new year.

All good things come to an end, as they say, but I hope you will agree that it was good while it lasted.

The Uppark blog has only been successful due to the authors efforts in creating the posts and to you the readers and followers for taking such an interest in what we have created.

So many thanks to all of our guest bloggers, followers and viewers. We hope that you have enjoyed our blog content and will continue to follow the events and changes at Uppark via Facebook and our National Trust – Uppark website.

Why not make one of your New Year resolutions to visit Uppark House and Garden in 2016.

From all here at Uppark we wish you a happy and prosperous New year and hope to see you at Uppark soon.

 

Editor’s note:  

A great final blog from Alan and the rest of the blogging team. Thank you all for making the Uppark garden blog so special. If you’d like to follow me I’m on Twitter and Instagram here @andylewishg – own views naturally. 

Uppark 2013 Blog in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2013 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 16,000 times in 2013. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 6 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

2012 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

4,329 films were submitted to the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. This blog had 23,000 views in 2012. If each view were a film, this blog would power 5 Film Festivals

Click here to see the complete report.

Garden Update

Tea Garden

We’ve removed the shrubs and herbaceous plants in the borders that are closest to the East Pavilion (shop entrance). We’ve levelled the bed and sown grass seed to extend the lawn. This is a temporary fix because over the winter we’ll be removing the turf and excavating so we can extend the gravel area. We’ve not decided exactly how we’re going to use this space but in the past it’s been a little tight with access restricted for our visitors and deliveries to the restaurant. It might be an area for tables and chairs or we could move the plant sales to this space?

What do you think? We’d love to hear from you, if you’re on site fill in a comment card, post a comment on the blog or send us a tweet @UpparkHG or @Fredrick_Uppark

Fredrick, our Gnome now on twitter

We’ve also been pruning the Portugal Laurel beyond the low flint wall around the perimeter of the Tea Garden. These shrubs have been reduced to around knee-height and will soon re-grow as many others around the garden have over the last couple of years.

It’s likely that there was originally a Yew hedge around the wall, some plants still survive and appear to have been planted in a line. It’s conceivable we could gap up and restore this hedge. It would offer protection and cover that’s been lost as a result of this rather drastic work – regular visitors should be used to that by now!

Hedge-Laying in the Visitor Car Park

This was wonderfully successful and I’m delighted to say we’ve retained the services of our Octogenarian (I’m sure he wont mind!) consultant, Aubrey, so we’re looking to do some more of this work in the coming months.

Conservation Statement Work

This restoration work will also be happening this winter. We’re taking the line of the peripheral borders back to where they should be and the date we’re working to is @1895, post Brown and Repton.

In the meantime – we’ll be collecting leaves!

25,000 viewings on our blog – thank you!

Our Blog: The Detail

Blowing our Trumpet – well someone’s got to do it! (image is close up of detail on our Coade Urn)

Early in 2011 Andy Lewis, the Head Gardener, talked to me about the Stourhead NT blog, we had a look at it together and were most impressed. Andy asked me if I could set up one like the Stourhead example and so our Blog began.
I set up the Blog in February 2011 and posted the first few articles. These were ‘Helping out at Swan Barn Farm’ and ‘Making Shingles at Hindhead’.

Those first couple of posts only produced about 60 viewings but slowly the frequency of posts and viewings picked up to where we are today.
So far we’ve produced 264 posts, mostly by Andy, had 23,485 viewings with an average of 64 viewings per day and on the busiest day, 12 August 2012, we had 330 viewings.
We’re hoping to hit 30,000 before the end of 2012.

I think the most interesting feature of the stats for our blog, provided by WordPress, is the breakdown of viewings by country. This is a new feature and it’s amazing to see where our blog viewers are viewing from.

The Stats produce a table more reminiscent of the Olympics medal tables.
Since February 2012 we’ve had viewings from 73 different countries ranging from Afghanistan to Vietnam. Our largest audiences come from the UK, USA and Germany. The map shows the extent of our Global audience.

Our blog world

The most popular post to date is ‘Uppark from the air’ with 402 viewings. The least viewed post is ‘Let’s make some noise’. Have a look and let us know what you think of them. There will be plenty more interesting posts to come so keep looking and if you really like what you see why not sign up to follow our blog by email. You’ll get an email as soon as the posts are published.

Until then…thanks for viewing!