How To Use The Site
A warm welcome to our Waterfurlong Orchard Gardens site. Thank you for visiting and for supporting our determination to protect and nurture this little-known corner of Stamford.
Whether your particular interest lies in old Stamford, family history, heritage apple varieties, traditional orchards or allotmenteering we hope you find useful material on our site.
We also hope local residents will enjoy learning more about the gardens today and the people who tend them.
If you have never visited Stamford, you might find it helpful to read our summary of the town's history and to check out maps showing where the gardens are located.
THE GARDENS TODAY
To learn more about the Waterfurlong Gardens today you might enjoy:
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the profiles on our Meet Today's Waterfurlong Gardeners page
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our gallery of photographs celebrating the Waterfurlong Gardening Year
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our Dog Of The Day feature, introducing some of our favourite canine visitors and their humans.
FAMILY HISTORY
In our gardeners section you will find biographies of Waterfurlong gardeners from times gone by. This is a work in progress and we are adding to it all the time. Subscribe to our blog, The Plot Thickens, for updates.
150 Years of Waterfurlong Gardeners looks at how our gardeners' lives crossed inside and outside their plots and what happened to the many children who once played there.
Our history section includes several further articles that might be of interest:
Our resources section includes Notes For Family Historians, which explains how we have used ancestry.com to set up family trees and record sources.
LOCAL HISTORY
Our history section focuses on Waterfurlong and its immediate surrounds, from Roman times to the Edwardian era. We will be adding information about the 20th century over the coming months.
The biographies in our gardeners' section contain many references to the wider town and surrounding villages, some with accompanying photographs.
APPLES AND ORCHARDS
In our apples section you will find:
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information on Traditional Orchards and heritage fruit varieties
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the story of Stamford's Lost Apples and the Stamford Apple-breeders
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an introduction to our Waterfurlong Apples
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an individual profile of each identified variety growing in the gardens
We have a detailed biography of Thomas Laxton in our gardeners section, focusing particularly on his years in Stamford.
WILDLIFE AND NATURE
Our nature section includes individual profiles of some of the more
unusual species recorded in the gardens.
Our article on Traditional Orchards and their unique habitat might also be of interest.
Do subscribe to our blog, The Plot Thickens for regular updates and articles.
