A GARDENING CONVERT: WORK IN PROGRESS

I’ve never considered myself a gardener: anything but. My grandfather’s, and more recently my mother’s, tours of their gardens used to bore me rigid but I now find that not only am I interested in what people are doing in their gardens but I’ve started discussing the ins and outs of horticulture, specifically related to my garden, with people who know far more about it than I do. I even recently bought a gardening magazine.

Just over a year ago we moved into a house in Brampton, north-east Cumbria. I eventually realised that we don’t so much have a single garden as a series of small gardens, each with its own distinct character. The advantage is that I can tackle each in turn, though I’ll be in one area and get distracted by something somewhere else. I’ve had ideas – not necessarily unchanged – for each patch. Just recently I took some photos so that I shall be able to have ‘before and after’ photos around the garden, and see how it changes over time.

The nice thing about the garden, as opposed to the house, is that I’m relatively relaxed about it taking some time to become the garden I want it to be. It changes, of course, from season to season anyway, unlike the décor of the house which remains fairly stable, albeit also currently unfinished. I’m still at the trial and error stage, finding out what works and what doesn’t: uncovered strawberry plants got eaten by birds; what we thought was a flowering cherry is in fact an apple tree; the pond has rather more algae than looks healthy; last year’s lavender plants all seem to have died; plastic compost bins aren’t that great especially not when placed on concrete paving slabs (pooh!). A month of snow over the winter killed off a few things: I was quite surprised, though I shouldn’t have been, to find that the dead leaves on the palm tree were actually mouldy and the stem had gone bendy. But then who would plant a palm tree in Cumbria anyway…

My main considerations for changing and I hope, improving, the garden were to get more colour and light into it; to ensure that it was fairly child-friendly; to grow some of our own vegetables; and to have an area specifically to encourage bees. To this end we have so far extended some of the grassed area a bit and the children have an area which is ‘theirs’ next to one of the lawns and near the pond. I’ve also put in some very small areas of pathway so that there are more clear routes onto lawned areas for cycling and running circuits.

We were very excited by our potatoes last year but this year the vegetable patch needs completely redigging, and ultimately I’d like to make it a couple of raised beds, raising the ground level by adding extra topsoil on top of home-made compost. It’s another area which has a lot of stones on it, as well as a layer of plastic sheeting underneath part of it (which I’ve mostly managed to remove). It is also riddled with the all-pervasive ivy and its long-reaching roots.

A large paved area at the back of the house will eventually become a wiggly stone path with climbing roses trained up the otherwise rather unattractive rear façade of the house – I’d like to add a porch to the back door later when funds permit. The idea is to have herbs you can walk on between the stones of the path, and vegetable patches next to the fence. We also want to build a better run for our ferrets and move their hutch: currently they have a run on our decking but can escape!

The only plants growing in this area at the moment are some wild strawberries and a couple of rather unhealthy looking shrubs, and our compost bin is in one corner. The lap boarded fence fell over in the snow as the wood is rotten and the posts hadn’t been dug in very deeply. This has rather precipitated the need to replace it, which I wanted to do anyway to let more light in: we also need to get the fence running up the side of the house where we have a boundary with a neighbour as otherwise the children go into her garden.

Lack of light was not only an issue at the back of the house and we are slowly trimming back or removing the bushes and conifers along the front. We have an area on top of a retaining wall which was completely overgrown which I’ve earmarked as a future ‘bee garden’: I want to make it look like moorland with lots of heather and similar plants, which I hope will not only attract the bees but make that area look tidier as well as keeping the weeds down. Ivy is a particular problem: when people built houses in the 1980s did they get a cheap job lot of ivy and conifers to stick in everywhere? Conifers were hiding some other lovely trees.

Colour has been added so far by a plentiful planting of bulbs but I’m now thinking of having a stone trough or an old bath at the front of the house containing alpines and, just because I think they’re beautiful, a camellia in a big pot. Likewise double-petalled primroses are on my list, just because I saw them advertised and fell in love with them.

I’ve mentioned colour and light, and the third sense I want to introduce into the garden is scent, so my study is littered with bits of paper torn out of magazines with ideas. Every trip to a garden centre is fraught with danger for my bank account. Anyone got anything they want to recycle from their garden?