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The Grand Tour #1: The Hilly Bit

29 Friday Oct 2010

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Some time ago I promised you a tour around my new garden in a little more detail. Well, now that we’re here, there are no further excuses: so let me take you for a little wander around the garden I now call home.

Imagine if you will a very long and quite thin bit of land along the edge of a lane, south-facing but aligned more or less east-west, and about the shape of an aeroplane wing. It is tapered at each end and has a broader bit (to about 50ft wide) in the middle. Now plonk a house in the middle of the broader bit and divide the whole thing into three by means of a footpath running through a third from one end, and a garage interrupting another third from the other end, and you have the basic layout.

We have three main ‘gardens’ (though one is actually a field with pretensions – in my head anyway – to become an orchard): the first bit is my fledgling veg garden and I’ve already shown visitors to m’other blog around so you’ll have to go have a look there if you’re interested.

The next bit is the main garden: the bit that wraps around the house and is about a third of an acre, give or take a bit.

In my head it is already a beautifully-crafted, well planned and exquisitely planted garden of various different parts, so come with me in my imagination and contemplate:

Part 1: The Woodland Garden(aka The Hilly Bit)

By this I mean the back half of the back garden, which slopes gently upwards towards the footpath between it and what we call the top field. In this photo you’ll have to avert your eyes from the large blue monstrosity in the middle: essential for keeping small children distracted, but a total eyesore. We have ambitious plans which involve terracing a bit just in front of the hill so we can move it back and to the side, and well out of the way.

Incidentally the ‘lawn’ (I use the term advisedly) is probably staying for a while at least, as there are rumours in the village of a spectacular display of sheets of snowdrops bringing admirers from miles around. Not so sure about the admirers, but rather fancy the snowdrops.


Anyway, to take this photo you’d be standing with your back to the trampoline, looking west up the hill: a space of about 50ft wide by 60ft long. What you are seeing is not in fact a somewhat daunting and rather shady slope full of weeds and overhung with neglected trees: it is in fact a choice woodland garden, dotted here and there by pretty birches and hazels and underplanted with lovely woodlanders like trilliums, ferns and bluebells. A path zigzags its way artlessly up the slope to the back, with occasional flights of wooden steps for those wishing to take a more direct route. At the top, to the left, is a rustic-style playhouse and den, made by my rather talented garden carpenter hubby and nestling into the corner and providing a perfect retreat for small children and later sulky teenagers, as well as being a nice little focal point when you get to the top of the slope and emerge into its clearing.

See? You’ve got to have imagination to look at this lot. Plenty of fairly colourful imagination.

Elsewhere in this section: this is a quarry, which has the great advantage of being superbly sheltered, and the rather daunting prospect of very high chalk banks at either side. Where the arrow is – that’s just about where the bank stops and the hedge starts. The top of the hedge is another 8ft or so above that. We are thinking scaffolding.

The opposite side of the garden, on the lane side (which is also the shady side). Another bank, this time more gently sloped, and therefore offering some intriguing possibilities for terraces up towards the foot of hedge this side. I’m thinking zigzag paths again, and a rather spectacular collection of ferns, podyphyllums, astilboides…. I have Keith Wiley’s gorgeous and inspirational book on gardening in shade on my bookshelf and I shall plunder it shamelessly.

There are actually some quite nice plants here already. Someone way back in the dim and distant past (not, I’m sorry to say, our immediate predecessors here) was a pretty good and knowledgeable gardener: although he/she didn’t quite cotton on to the fact that roses don’t like chalk and therefore there are a lot of rather sick rose bushes cluttering the place up. Not this one, though, which is some sort of Rosa alba I think and therefore tough enough to scoff in the face of non-ideal soil types.

Clematis are everywhere: this is much to my delight as I have always rather struggled to grow clematis before. This one is in the main garden but I now also have a monster hedge (as if we didn’t have enough hedges) of a pink C. montana – either ‘Elizabeth’ or var. rubens, not sure yet – on the front wall which promises spectacular sights in spring.

And my pride and joy, and if I’m honest, one of the reasons I bought the house; this is of course Ginkgo biloba, a plant I have always wanted to grow as I just adore those leaves. Now instead of struggling to persuade a stringly little sapling to grow into a proper plant, I have all to myself a really big, mature tree, maybe 30ft high, and as hale and hearty as they come. What’s more – this picture was taken a few weeks ago and now all those leaves have turned the most vivid shade of butter yellow you can imagine. What a tree.

A housewarming present

26 Sunday Sep 2010

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My poor container plants are all higgledy-piggledy. There are geraniums on the steps and a loquat tree teetering on the wall, the lawn is developing oval-shaped sickly yellow patches under tubs of mint dumped and still there two weeks after moving, and all my lovingly-sown salad leaves, still in their seed tray about to be transplanted into their large and roomy trough, were eaten by large snails on the first night we got here.

But though I could be gloomy and pessimistic I am not: for among it all appeared a single flower which has become my Good Omen and convinced me that despite all evidence to the contrary everything is going to be All Right.

I posted some time ago about an unfeasibly big Hedychium I was given which I promptly split in three. You won’t be at all surprised to find that the experimental portion I left in the ground perished forthwith during last year’s winter: but I have two left. The one in the house is alive, but small and not very enthusiastic: but the one I overwintered in the greenhouse is rude with health.

Since I knew I was moving I kept it in the pot: it only just survived the move, in fact, as while it was on its perilous trip from greenhouse to removal van there was a horrible creaking and ripping noise and one of the large branches listed drunkenly sideways. The removal van was rather sweet, if a little gung-ho, and grabbed a nearby leg of greenhouse staging to plunge it in the pot: he then used a webbing strap of the sort they have in removal lorries to lash the whole lot together. Heath Robinson it may be but it saved my ginger lily.

It has rewarded me – and, in absentia, the removal van man – by producing its first-ever flower spike. It is a little late in the season and since temperatures are dropping by the hour it may never quite make it to flowering stage: but even the fact that it’s trying is one of those little signs of hope which help you make it through the cardboard boxes and out the other side.

We got here… at last

22 Wednesday Sep 2010

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Here’s a picture for the divine Ms B, who wanted to know what my new house looks like.

The blue sky helps: I am told this is an aberration, as we are now officially living in the West Country where it rains. Nearly all the time. Except since we moved here. Perhaps we might be inadvertently responsible for a seismic climatic shift in the British Isles?

Anyway: yes, we are here, esconced in our improbably chocolate-box thatched stone cottage, and I also have a broadband connection at last: a confusion with BT and the previous owners left me internet-free for a whole week and a half, and I was rather scared at how utterly lost and slightly frantic I felt without it.

Now however normal service has been resumed: although that kind of depends what you define as normal as our lives are now so different it feels as if our ‘normal’ has morphed into something we’re having to get used to recognising.

But it is wonderful: and about as far from our semi-detached ex-council house in Surrey as it is possible to get. Which was kind of the point, really.

A little sneak peek

25 Wednesday Aug 2010

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We went to visit the new house the other day: and this time, I was armed with a camera. Thought you might like a little sneak peak: here’s my new garden.


Small children are an optional extra: we’ve decided to keep the one with the long hair and the one in the blue jacket but the one with the blonde hair is going.

(I should hasten to add that Long Hair is my eldest, Blue Jacket is my youngest, and Blonde Hair belongs to the current owners, and is rather sweet. The dog, unfortunately, also belongs to them: we plan to install our own very soon).

The garden is in what’s left of a former quarry, which explains the steep slope at the back. You can’t quite make out that there are also very steep banks at either side, presenting some, ahem, interesting gardening challenges.

Anyway: this bit measures about 50ft x 200ft. But that’s not all: this is a garden of many parts.

Part II is a smaller and more well-behaved bit to the other side of the house: it’s stepped down the hill in a rather attractive sort of way (this is looking down the slope).

And here’s part III. We rather optimistically call it the orchard, mainly on the grounds that it has two apple trees in it (as well as a not-very-well-looking pear tree): it’s not quite the sweeping vistas you would expect of your average orchard as it’s long and very thin. I measured it at approximately 180ft x 15ft.

One of the reasons for the not-very-well pear tree, I suspect, is the lack of air circulation: that hedge is about 10ft tall. You will hear more about that hedge in due course, I suspect: a lot more. There is a lot of hedge. Oh my Lord, there is a lot of hedge.

There’s a bit more too, further up the hill, which we’re optimistically referring to as the paddock so doesn’t really count as garden: we’re going to be using that mainly for my chickens and other animals, and possibly my husband (don’t worry, I’ll invite him down to the house from time to time). There’s also a sort of raised rockery sort of thing in front of the house which rather defies explanation, photography or indeed description.

Soil is chalky but not too dry (owing to the bowl-like dip) and it’s all on the side of a south-facing hill, with the long side facing south, if you know what I mean. Any ideas, inspirations or just thoughts on what to do will be just wonderful and pathetically gratefully received.

I will introduce you properly when we’re in: we’re not entirely free of the potential for jinx just yet as we’re still a day or two off exchanging contracts. But there is just one week and four days to go until moving day now: and this is beginning to feel very imminent indeed.

A composting conundrum

22 Sunday Aug 2010

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I haven’t said anything for a little while about my heinous abandonment of my current garden in favour of (considerably larger) pastures new.

The Great Move is however rumbling along behind the scenes, and in fact is now so imminent that we are spending all our time hurling things into skips and filling our living room with cardboard boxes.

Clearing up the garden has however raised a conundrum.

I was going to put a photo of my compost bins at the top of this post by way of illustration but thought I’d spare you that. The thing is, like all good gardeners, I nurse a secret composting obsession and have two fine and large wooden slatted bins.

When told I was taking them both, husband and Removal Van man nodded sagely: large wooden items, especially ones which look quite nice as compost bins go, are apparently acceptable.

However I then added that I was going to bag up the nearly completely rotted compost from one of them, and the not-very-rotted compost from the other, and bring it with me too.

Both husband and Removal Van Man now think I’m utterly, utterly bonkers.

I think a) it’s not very welcoming to leave our nice new owners with a big pile of half-rotted guineapig poo and b) I’ve spent nigh on a year making this compost and I’m damned if I’m going to abandon it now. And besides where I’m going I’ll need all the compost I can get.

So: help us out here. What do you think? Am I bonkers? Would you move with your compost tucked in among your furniture? Or would you let it go?

Moving matters #5: Of philistines

26 Monday Apr 2010

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We are still trying to sell our house.

Apart from a little flurry where we briefly thought someone had bought it, we have watched noses being turned up at the rate of about two a week.

This is because – and I am about to launch on a rant of Colbornian proportions (if not style) here – people are philistines.

As I have mentioned before, my garden is looking a bit spesh at the moment. Tulips a go-go, forget-me-nots smiling at the sunshine, grass a-greening and blossom sprinkling the trees. It doesn’t get much more beautiful than this, and it’s a great improvement on our early days of house-selling when we were trying to convince everyone that our expanse of humps huddled over chilly bare soil would eventually look really spectacular. Honest, guv.

Well, now it does look spectacular. And you know what happened the other day? This nice couple came round, made appreciative noises about the house and its proximity to a good primary school, then walked into the garden.

They traversed the tulips, skirted the wendyhouse, glanced at the industrious plant-production going on in greenhouse and shed and peered at the pond.

Then they returned to the bit where you can look over the fence into next-door’s garden. Now, I adore my next-door-neighbours who are the friendliest and most cheerful family you could ever wish to live cheek-by-jowl with. But they wouldn’t mind me saying their garden is basically a 200-foot long football pitch.

“Ah,” said our erstwhile buyers. “Now that’s the sort of garden we’d be looking for.”

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRHHGHHHHHHHHH
HHHMMMMMMFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF!!!!!!!!!

What IS IT with people? WHY can’t they show even the teensiest smidgen of imagination? Let alone creativity? And as for connection with the soil… clearly disappeared under a coating of Dulux-painted plasterboard decades ago.

I’m not asking for an appreciation society for my garden: just some sign that it is a good thing to have outside space which is cared for and used with an eye for beauty and enjoyment of nature.

So many of the miserable, limited-horizon people coming through our door seem to expect a takeaway garden. One you can buy off the shelf, plonk behind the back door to fill up that intimidating place called Outside so it looks more or less “done” and then forget about it.

Never mind that it is a living thing with the irritating habit of growing. In fact flowers are a bit of a pain, aren’t they? They come, and then they go, and then you have to clean up after them.

Suburbia is taking over the world. And I don’t mean that in a nice way.

No wonder people are selling off their back gardens hand over fist so they can be built on. It’s only just occurred to me, after years of making other excuses (population density, housing crisis, yadayadayada) that it’s actually because they don’t, in fact, want a back garden. If you build on land it’s a convenient way of stopping all those annoying growing things appearing, isn’t it? Hey – get this. You don’t even have to mow it. Low maintenance or what?

No wonder new-builds are so popular with their itty-squitty handkerchief-sized gardens. No wonder half my writing is about how to do gardening without a garden. And no wonder people look at me as if I’m mad when I say one of the reasons I want to move away from my 200ft x 30ft garden is because I haven’t got enough outside space.

I have reached three conclusions from this bruising and to be honest profoundly depressing process.

1) we’re going to have a bloody tough job selling our house.
2) I live too close to London.
3) I like gardeners more than any other people on the planet.

Moving matters #4: Things ain’t what they used to be

06 Saturday Mar 2010

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Just got back from my first proper day of house-hunting.

Things are getting a little panicky at home as we’ve started getting people offering actual money for our house and this has made us realise that when you sell the house from under your feet you aren’t allowed to live in it any more.

This means you have to find another house to live in. Quite quickly.

So I began my odyssey around the south-east of England – more specifically, my home county of West Sussex – to work my way through the “hmmm…. maybe” houses we’ve gathered in our long, long spell of whimsical drifting around internet house-hunting sites. Mostly drive-bys to check out gardens + locations, though I did go inside a couple of them.

This made me realise that houses, and more to the point gardens, have shrunk in the eight years since I last did this. And West Sussex is all but unrecognisable from my admittedly nostalgia-tinged memories of a rather idyllic childhood spent riding ponies around the South Downs.

First, most of the area from Arundel to Petworth to Chichester to Rowland’s Castle – that’s much of the south-east of England – has been paved over while I wasn’t looking.

Second, the bits that are not paved over are eye-wateringly expensive.

So here’s what house-hunting is like in our credit-crunched topsy-turvy times:

House 1 was right on the high street of an extremely busy (but quite pleasant, if you didn’t have to open your front door onto it every day) country town. Didn’t stop long enough to see the garden or I would have caused a traffic jam right in the middle of the Saturday shopping crowd.

House 2 was said on the estate agent’s particulars to be “a plot of 0.7 acres”. Sounds good, doesn’t it? Until you realise that a) the estate agent clearly has his acres confused with square metres, and b) about 0.6 of the 0.7 is house.

House 3 was the only one I saw all day which was in a location I would have lived in. Stunning views across the countryside, pretty village, primary school, nice neighbours…. The garden was quite manicured in an uptight sort of way (pampas grass, trimmed euonymus, spiky things in tubs) but not too unpleasant – only trouble was the estate agents’ blurb hinted there was much more of it than appeared to be the case. Though I might have got the boundaries wrong. Another major setback was that the house was more akin to a beach hut.

House 4: in such a nightmare location I couldn’t stop without causing a pile-up (I was going 50mph at the time like the three lanes of traffic beside me and only just glimpsed it out of the corner of my eye).

House 5 was a pretty little bungalow – normally I’m very biased against bungalows but this one was gorgeous, all hung with creeper and cottage garden. Like many streets where bungalows are found the neighbours scored quite high in the blue rinse stakes but at least it was peaceful. Quite keen on this one until I got home and found it had already been sold.

House 6 had a fantastic garden with quite the biggest greenhouse I’ve ever seen in a domestic setting. It stretched from one side of the garden to the other – that’s about 40 feet – and there was a second (more normal-sized) greenhouse as well. If I tell you that even with both greenhouses and a summer house there was still loads of garden left you’ll realise what a covetable space it was. Only trouble was that you’d have an audience for every spadeful you dug: there were no fewer than five houses backing onto one side, and two backing onto the end. Talk about gardening in a goldfish bowl.

House 7: why do people choose to live in places where you get mashed to a pulp by speeding motorcars on taking more than two steps from your front door?

House 8: the chavs over the road were doing something so complicated to their souped-up car (spoilers plus decals) that they had to play VERY LOUD MUSIC to get the screws to loosen off. I’d have my screws loose living opposite that lot for long. It was a shame really as this one had a huge garden with a pony paddock in the bottom too: mind you the chav music was almost – but not quite – drowned out by the relentless howl of combustion engines from the not-very-far-away A3.

Conclusion from the day: we can’t afford to live here.

Moving matters #3: Home improvements

11 Thursday Feb 2010

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You know that thing you do when you’re selling a house when you rush round getting all the jobs done that needed doing for the last five years but you’ve never got round to? Just in time for someone else to enjoy the fruits of your labours?

Well I’ve discovered the same thing applies to the garden. Now – brace yourself: this is a bit of the garden I never – and I mean never – show people if I can possibly help it.

Here’s a ‘before’ shot, taken in June 2008 when it was at its absolute worst, of the middle section of the garden: the section we’ve been about-to do up for quite some time.

You can see why I avoided showing it to people, can’t you?

Over the ensuing two years progress has been painfully slow, but there has been progress of sorts: we’ve moved the shed which you can see to the right, and cleared the undergrowth and much of the junk. However it has still remained the bonfire spot of choice and the place where large loads of manure, sand and topsoil get dumped for want of anywhere else. My experience of this little wilderness has led me to form a firm belief that scruffiness just breeds scruffiness.

Anyway: the idea was always that there would be a central children’s play area to house slides, trampolines and the like (it’s opposite the wendy house) and I would plant it up with something cottagey around the edges.

The imminent prospect of dozens of people walking through my garden and seeing the scene of wreckage above has acted like a large box of nitroglycerine delivered beneath our backsides: and we’ve finally got on and done it.


Do you know what – it took about three hours to install it and was really, really easy. Hubby has also laid a nifty little path across to it since this photo was taken.

Now for the exciting bit: the plan is to rotavate all the spare ground around it and seed it with one of those lovely Sheffield mixes of meadow-style annuals from Pictorial Meadows. A quick fix akin to painting over the stains on the walls with a swish of Dulux: but much, much prettier.

It is so maddening that you always get these things done just in time to leave them behind. I would have saved myself a lot of abject apologising had I got on with it, say, two years ago, and I’d also have been able to enjoy those sparkly meadow flowers all for myself every summer.

I think there’s an aberrant and probably masochistic gene which only switches on when you begin moving house. I have it in spades: it impels you to demonstrate to yourself what might have been, had you been more efficient, more perfect, and just a bit less inclined to procrastinate.

Moving matters #2: Seeing things through others’ eyes

21 Thursday Jan 2010

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Well, things are progressing rapidly on the house-moving front: we’ve had our HIPs report done (what are they for, exactly?) and now we’ve had the details drawn up, so on my desk I have a leaflet all about our house as seen by others.

This has been something of an eye-opener. You get so used to complaining about this or that little niggle, and carping on about the stuff that you know needs doing but you haven’t got around to, that you forget that overall it’s not actually that bad. In fact, it’s quite nice, really.

This is particularly so with the garden. I know just how dreadful my garden is: after all, I’ve seen all those perfect gardens you go visit during summer, and I know what a good garden looks like. Not like my garden, that’s for sure.

Whenever I look at my garden, I see the borders near the house which don’t have as much winter structure as they should and are an odd shape which I’ve been meaning to change for years. Then the middle section is what can only be politely described as a “work in progress”: we’ve had an ongoing bonfire there for a while and that’s where all the piles of compost or sand or bricks have been dumped while we’ve been doing our bits of landscaping. The kids’ area, where the fishpond is, needs a bit of a weed-through and there’s a path to be put in.

The wildlife pond and exotic-ish garden are another work in progress: the intended boardwalk is still just planks on the ground. And the muddy chicken run with its half-pruned apple trees (a current project but temporarily kiboshed by the foul weather) is hardly a model fruit garden.

But get this. Someone comes round our house to see what we’ve got, and although admittedly they’re trying to sell the place, they can’t actually lie. And this is what they wrote about my garden.

The front is “landscaped with deep semi-circular well-stocked border” and “pretty beech hedging”. And as for the back: it’s “very substantial”, apparently, and those odd-shaped beds near the house are transformed into “formal gardens” with “well-stocked shrub and flower borders”. Our chicken-run apple trees are a “mini-orchard” and we have a “large timber shed”, “triple compost heap” and “mature trees”.

Blimey, I’d go and look at it myself if I read that lot. I don’t know whether to laugh at the triumph of estate-agent speak over reality, or wonder if my garden is, really, a bit nicer than I thought it was. For now I think I shall just allow myself to be very flattered.

Moving matters #1: Getting ready

11 Monday Jan 2010

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Well I was going to bring you a picture of all my little cuttings, carefully taken at the end of last year and now hunkered down over winter to (hopefully) root and produce oodles of new plants for me to take with me when (if?) I move house this year.

But this is all I’ve seen of them for the last month: they’re in my coldframe and of course that means covered by a good few inches of snow. So I have no idea how they’re doing, whether my root cuttings have rotted off into hopeless mush or my carefully-trimmed hardwood cuttings have shrivelled into wizened sticks. At the moment I’m choosing the optimistic view as both root cuttings and hardwood cuttings are tough as nails (that’s why you can get away with taking them at this time of year) and survive just about anything.

I’m trying to avoid stripping the garden bare when/if the new occupants move in and leaving them with a crater-pocked landscape of bare earth to look at. It seems a bit curmudgeonly somehow to take everything I can get my hands on, a bit like removing the light switches.

Cuttings, of course, are the best possible way of taking it all with you without… well… taking it all with you. So I’ve got root cuttings of my beloved ‘Goliath’ poppies (twelve of them… where I’m going to put twelve Goliath poppies, new garden or no new garden, I have no idea) and hardwood cuttings of my ‘Ben Lomond’ blackcurrants and my louche-flowered and deliciously scented apothecary’s rose (Rosa gallica var. officinalis). All of which take reliably from cuttings so I don’t have to worry too much about failures (though that, of course, is without factoring in a thirty-year record snowfall).

I’m eyeing up my little one-year-old box hedge in the front garden, thinking I might take a hundred or so cuttings from them just to avoid having to buy another pile of box hedging when/if I arrive at my palatial new pad; and I shall sweep through the garden taking as many softwood cuttings as I can in April, assuming as I think I safely can that we’re still here and haven’t found someone to fall in love with our house and simultaneously a new house to fall in love with by then. There are a few plants I can’t leave behind – like my growing Hemerocallis collection, most of it kept in trust for the NCCPG, or Plant Heritage as I should call it these days, via its plant exchange. And perhaps one or two things which a less-than-horticulturally-minded buyer might not fully appreciate, like my Euphorbia mellifera and my loquat tree. But I’m aiming to keep the garden more-or-less presentable at least: after all, what kind of gardener would I be if I wasn’t willing to share the love and give away a few plants here and there?