Just under four years ago now, the dave27 clan relocated from Stafford in the Midlands to Kirkham in Lancashire with my job and we bought a new house.
Now anyone who has ever moved to a new house will tell you that it's both a very exciting, but also a very daunting time, especially when you are thinking about the garden.
New houses are generally left with a bit of a bomb site for the back garden. The builders will usually give you a shallow coating of top soil it's true, but underneath you'll never know what you're going to find.
In our case the house had been built on the builder's compound and so we had a mixture of really awful, thick, sodden clay and all manner of slabs, bricks and rubble left by the builders. It took me ages to clear and treat the ground and most of the summer of 1997 was a back breaking toil of labour.
Now, what you may be asking, has this got to do with David Austin Roses....
Well, I just needed to set the scene and what I'm trying (not very successfully, says Mrs D, so I'll speed up a bit) to tell you is that we had a virtually virgin wasteland at the back upon which we could paint a wonderful canvas of a garden and I could get it exactly how I wanted and I'd always lusted after a really big rose bed with all my heart (what a sad fellow!)
When I was planning out my garden, I got all the rose brochures I could find and started planning what to order. I must have received about ten or twelve catalogues, but one really stood out for me. It was well produced and lovingly illustrated and had a marvellous range. It was from a company called David Austin Roses, who I later found out had an excellent reputation.
I ordered most of the plants I needed from David Austin and they duly arrived more or less exactly the week that they had led me to believe in the late Autumn and they were of a particularly high calibre, with some splendid Old English style roses, like Gertrude Jekyll and Graham Thomas, and I was absolutely delighted. They all worked out splendidly and have been absolutely true to the catalogue description which was first rate.
David Austin specialise in the Old English varieties and I'm a real sucker for them, so DA was a godsend to me in my hour of need.
Not long afterwards I happened to be visiting Stafford and so I decided to pay the David Austin company a visit because they're located near there at a small place called Albrighton on the road to Wolverhampton.
They've got a very large plot of land and they're set well away off a big back road on a country road. The rose garden there is an absolute dream and well worth a visit. You can view many of their wonderful varieties at first hand and I'd urge you to take a trip out if you're ever over that way.
The staff there are very helpful, knowledgeable and friendly and they stock a huge range of plants.
For many people, David Austin is Roses and even though you'll pay a bit more than with many of the mail order companies when you buy through David Austin, they always deliver an exceptionally high quality product which will always live up to expectations.
RECOMMENDED in big three foot high letters...
How helpful would this review be to a person making a buying decision? Rating guidelines
May 29th, 2001
(Oct 19th, 2001)
very helpful by (100%):
