When we first moved into our current house, the garden was almost a complete blank. A flat rectangle of grass with a straight path down one side, an unused greenhouse towards the bottom end with about 30 – 40 feet of brambles and rubble all banked up behind it and chain-link fencing down the sides.
We spent our first Winter planning how we wanted it to look – not too ambitious to begin with, we simply wanted to get some plants in there and take away some of the straight lines. We dug borders and changed the shape of the path and my mother gave us a Flowering Cherry tree.
We were pleased to find out that, until about 12 years earlier, what was now grass had been filled with roses. This must have been quite something – the garden is approximately 50 metres long from the yard and about 5 metres wide and 50 – 75% of this was roses. Anyway, they must have done the earth a lot of good, and the earth kept that goodness all locked up until we came along and started planting. The result was that it seemed like anything planted grew like crazy. Actually, there are some things that don’t do well and, of course, some of the things that do grow well, we would prefer them not to.
Over the years we have managed to reclaim all of the area behind the greenhouse as well as using the greenhouse itself for a number of years for tomatoes, cucumber, basil, aubergine, etc. However, the greenhouse is no more – taken away when we built a studio at the end of the garden. We still try growing fruit and veg but these days the british Summer is more suited to moss cultivation than anything needing a bit of sunshine. Speaking of which, why not visit the Moss Appreciation Society on Facebook.
There are always improvements and changes we want to make to the garden but whether or not we get round to doing anything about them doesn’t matter to me, I still love our garden the way it is – never too much under our control!
. . . and the birds . . . I used to play birdsong recordings in the background on the computer sometimes in our previous studio – now I don’t have to. Even without StillWalks, they are always there in the garden, right beside me.