In 2015 we developed a small area at the back of our Tudor garden in order to plant some old varieties of apple tree, which you can read about here. Nine years later and the trees are looking good and have become established enough to produce quite a few apples this year. As it’s Halloween, perhaps we might try the traditional game of apple-bobbing!
Thanks to all our volunteers who maintain our lovely garden.
Visitors during 2024 may have noticed the development work at the top of the garden which has meant some reduced space at times. This area has been developed to reflect its previous incarnation as a ‘Coventry Court’ (accommodation) by marking out the area in bricks.
We were delighted to have this work complete for Heritage Open Days to allow more space in the garden and we set up the refreshment gazebo in this area. Our next plans are to include some interpretation to explain the meaning of this new brick area. Here is a little peek at this area when it had just been completed. Can you guess what the small area of bricks and loose gravel represents?
Here’s how the area looked at the start of the project. We think you can agree that’s an improvement!
“Yet more history to absorb and appreciate. The UK’s valuing of their heritage is to be admired”
“What a super little place – I’m a Coventrian and didn’t know this place was here”
Just two of the reviews from the Visitors’ Book after our first Open Day of 2024 at The Weaver’s House. After all of the rain that has fallen in recent weeks we were relieved to have a mild and dry day! The day ran smoothly thanks to our volunteer guides, gardeners and bakers. Interested in getting involved? It’s not just about giving talks or welcoming guests, we have plenty of ‘back-of-house’ roles available too. Take a look at our volunteers page for more info.
Ahead of the first Open Day the volunteers will be getting stuck into the garden after the winter. The first Gardening Day of the year is Saturday 30 March.
We are currently seeking more gardening volunteers to join in with looking after our Tudor-style garden. If you are interested, please do make contact with Tina, who leads the volunteer team, via volunteers @ theweavershouse.org * ahead of the day itself (as we need to know how many people will be on site.)
No experience and no references are required – just straightforward details and a chat beforehand. Gardening days run throughout the year but there is no expectation that volunteers will attend all of them.
*(Please note, you will need to delete the spaces from the email address to get it to work, we insert the spaces to reduce spam emails).
We were joined on a sunny day in July by the Cambridge Guild of Weavers, Spinners & Dyers for a private tour of the House and garden. Our trustee Sara shared her wonderful collection of dyed samples and the visitors declared themselves to have “benefitted from the passion for the building, knowledge and expertise” of our volunteer guides.
In turn, we benefitted from them identifying a strange plant in the garden. A whorl of leaves appeared last year which we left to see what new kind of plant would develop. They quickly identified it as Dyer’s Weld also known as dyer’s weed, yellow weed, dyer’s rocket, woold or weld.
It is much loved and visited by bees and other insects. The leaves can be used both fresh or dried but the fresh leaves produce a much brighter yellow colour than the dried. It is a huge plant and the seed either blew into the garden or arrived via a bird.
It has quite a history. In Roman times the robes of Vestal Virgins, priestesses appointed to the service of Vesta, virgin goddess of Rome’s sacred hearth and its flame, were dyed yellow with weld.
Nearer to home when over-dyed with woad, it produces Lincoln Green, the colour reputedly used to dye the clothes of the legendary Robin Hood and his band of merry men in the 13th century!
If you belong to a group who would like to visit but cannot join us for the standard Open Days we will happily arrange to open up at a time to suit you – read more details here.
Fifteen years ago today The Weaver’s House was looking rather different (although it was well on the way to restoration). Here’s some photos from then and now.
Some more photos of the garden site before we added all the beds and the wooden shelter at the top of the garden, and the view in 2022.
Below, the garden as it appears today.
If you would like to come and see the transformed site for yourself, we have regular Open Days.
Whilst we have been closed, we have made some improvements in our garden area including a brick block paved area and installing some more woven fence panels.
We reused old bricks to fit in with the rest of the garden, and we also needed quite a lot of sand and gravel!
The volunteer work was led by John Homer and we are grateful for him for donating his time and expertise to the project. Although weather wasn’t the greatest we did have a few moments of sun. Throughout, our volunteers worked really hard to get the area completed and we are hoping the weather will repay us with sunshine when we are ready for Open Days!
We’re so pleased to have been able to give these old bricks a new lease of life and to have an additional area in the garden for displays.
It wasn’t all just bricks and blocks, we also spent some time tending to the garden which needed a little post-winter care, as all gardens do. It’s a wonderful place to spend some time, and always hard to believe that it is so close to the city centre.
We have regular gardening days for volunteers and welcome new recruits. It doesn’t need to be a regular commitment – if you would like to find out more about working in our garden, or you have other skills you would like to volunteer, please see our Volunteering page. Come and join the history of this amazing little house.
Whilst we are still locked down and unsure of plans for the year ahead, it was a delight to see these beautiful photos of The Weaver’s House in the snow.
The photos were taken by our resident, Charlie, and you can read about his experience moving into the site last year, here.
A snow day would have been a very different matter for the residents of these little cottages in medieval times. There were no windows installed then, for a start, just cloth to keep out the draughts. The nearby River Sherbourne would probably have frozen. Nowadays we don’t see snow that often, so we are grateful to Charlie for sending us these pics (especially as taking them from his vantage point means they are untroubled by footprints!).
Anyone who has been following our updates for a while may recall that a number of years ago we featured the planting of some heritage variety apple trees at the site. This October 31st marks five years since the trees went in!
The apple trees are all English heritage varieties, at least one of which pre-dates the existence of the Weaver’s House itself:
Old Pearmain, the earliest recorded English apple, existing before 1200AD.
Wyken Pippen, which has a Coventry connection. It is thought that Lord Craven took a pip from an apple brought back from Holland or France and planted it at Wyken.
Leathercoat Russet, this apple was once widely grown and referred to by Shakespeare in Henry IV.
English Codlin, a cooking apple which as its name suggests requires only gentle ‘coddling’ to soften.
And since the original trees went in, we have added Lemon Pippin, a very old apple, thought to be English or Norman, in existence before 1685. It is an oval fruit, with lemon yellow skin and flesh often covering the stalk, giving it the same shape as a lemon. It has crisp, sweet flesh with a slight tang. It was dried as well as being cooked.
Apples trees take a few years to produce anything much of a crop, so it was exciting to see a good amount of fruit on the trees in early October. However – a mere few days later, all the apples were gone, and the single chomped fruit pictured was the only sign that there had been any at all!
Perhaps some New Year wassailing will bring everyone better fortunes in 2021.
“Gardening is a way of showing that you believe in tomorrow.” Anon
A strange year indeed, which has seen us open precisely zero times.
However, the garden does not know this and it has required the usual amount of work to keep it in order. It ran rather wild with all the sun and rain but thanks to volunteers including Tina and Kevin, it’s now looking in good shape.
Huge thanks to our volunteers for getting stuck in and doing a lot of hard work to get the garden sorted.