Damselflies & Rose Garden at Heathfield

I was walking past the sunken garden at Heathfield when I noticed this single damselfly in the pond. I became aware that it was not the only one as others appeared as the mating season had begun.

The damselflies courtship is quite exquisite as they fly together. A mating pair form a wheel shape with the male clasping the female by the back of the head while the female arches her abdomen to connect with his lower genitals. They may remain in this position for a minute or two but, occasionally for hours while the egg laying process in water based plants is completed. The larvae are also carnivorous eating all types of smaller insects.

Damselflies are smaller than their fellow Odonata the dragonfly. Dragonflies rest with their wings open whereas damselflies rest with their wings closed and their front and back wings are the same size.

The pond in the sunken garden

the sunken garden and side of Heathfield House

The council propose that the area in the above photograph will be fenced off in addition to the veranda overlooking the garden and the mid terrace in order to lease Heathfield House to Cressey College a SEN school. This will mean there will be no wheelchair or buggy access to the Bee World rock garden that is past the sunken garden. In addition the Croydon Ecology Centre based at Heathfield will not be able to organise their school visits involving hundreds of schoolchildren according to Lorraine Chatfield the Ecology Warden. For further details of the impact this will cause please view this article by History & Social Action News and Events.

This part of the house will be fenced off also under the council proposals

mid terrace steps to Rose Garden below

If you follow the steps down to the Rose Garden you can see that it is laid out in design of a Celtic Cross. The forerunner of the rose garden that we recognise today actually had its origins in France and was first planted by Joséphine de Beauharnais in the gardens of the Château de Malmaison, 10 miles west of the centre of Paris, between 1799 and 1814. More familiarly known as Joséphine Bonaparte she was the Empress of the French as the first wife of Emperor Napoleon I. At her death in 1814, the garden included over 250 varieties of rose. British designers of rose gardens include Thomas Mawson who worked on Graythwaite Hall (1886) and Bushey (1913).

Roses in the wild grow in reds, pinks, yellows and white. The red colour in roses is caused by protocyanin and other differences in colours are due to the ph. of the flower petals. I have taken some close ups of the Heathfield roses.

When Henry Goshen purchased the Heathfield estate in 1869 the main drive way ran through the area of the Rose Garden coming from across the fields at a point halfway up Gravel Hill. An alternative entrance was built on the corner of Ballard’s Way, but it was not until Raymond Riesco purchased the house and estate in May 1927 that the grounds were redeveloped including the terraces, rock garden (now Bee World) and rose garden with the Gravel Hill entrance closed.

The lodge at Gravel Hill marks the original entrance to Heathfield

Above and below the original entrance would have run by the lodge and across these fields and through the area that is now the rose garden