Re-Organising The Garden. Again!

Spring has sprung, the grass is riz; well, not our grass, it’s fake so it just sits there doing nothing all year round. But the sentiment is there. It’s that time of year when I sit in the conservatory, looking out onto the small patch of earth I call my garden, and say to myself, “this year I WILL have a garden I am happy to sit in. I have been saying this for the last 25 years and there have been times when I have so very nearly achieved my goal. Don’t get me wrong, when we moved into this house the garden was one of its selling points, along with the bathroom. It had a small raised lawn edged with shrubs and a small greenhouse in the corner. The greenhouse came down a couple of years after we moved in when Netti and Lauren thought it would be cool to climb onto its roof which, predictably, caved in. Luckily they weren’t injured. But the greenhouse had to go. The space where it had been turned out to the sunniest spot in the garden in the mornings and I would sit there, sipping my coffee, often with my grandson, Cain, sleeping beside me in his pram whilst Danii went shopping.

Over the next few years, with children, grandchildren and a dog, the lawn began to look threadbare and what grass did remain was matted with moss. We did try to re-turf it once but not with much success. After struggling with it for a couple of years we enlisted the aid of my mother and dad and dug the whole lot up to create one muddy level with raised beds around the edges where Mother and Dad built us a water feature, nice at first but deteriorated into a stagnant, boggy mess over the next few years; mainly due to its position against a north facing wall and beneath a rapidly overgrowing holly tree. This holly tree was to become the bane of my life over the next 15 years or so. I truly detested it’s existence, the more so because there was nothing I could do about it since it was in the garden behind us. As it grew larger and larger it not only cut off the sunlight to our garden it also made the dining room dark and dingy. I even tried to work out how to poison it once! And no, I didn’t. It remained firmly in place. But I digress. We now had a quagmire, but we did have a water feature. And it would probably have stayed like that the following year but in the April of 2001 Paul’s father died and, due to our house being bigger, the wake was held here. Which meant we had to hurriedly make the garden fit for people to walk round. So we bought a load of cheapish paving slabs and dropped them in place. We knew they were uneven but we didn’t have the time; or the money; to do a proper job. And so it remained for the next six years or so.

In mid 2003  we inherited two Irish Setters, a mother and son. They had been banished into exile from Scotland when the 11 year old son of their owner; Paul’s business partner at that time; let them loose around some lambs. They were only saved because we agreed to take them on with the proviso that they would be urban dogs and kept well away from any livestock. The biggest problem with them was the constant digging in what few flower beds we had. We would often come home from days out, holidays and weekends away to find the orange blossom poised over a deep hole with its roots wafting in the breeze, or the mahonia on it’s side. We didn’t just leave them, in case you’re concerned, Danii used to dog sit for us. After few summers of this Paul decided it was time to stop the whole garden being dug up, so in 2010 we re-vamped the greenhouse end once again with some raised decking and to prevent the dogs getting up there and digging up all the plants we put a balustrade and gate across the front. Now we had somewhere nice to sit and only the orange blossom to worry about. We continued to live with what was left of the wonky paving until 2013.

This was a big year for me; in March I retired from the NHS with a nice pension and a substantial lump sum with which I paid off the greater part of my mortgage and by April I was working in the private sector earning a decent amount, so we had a bit of money to spare each month. This was also the year of the infamous trip to France with my sister, Manda, in July. Which was when Paul decided that he was going to take up the now cracked, as well as wonky, old slabs. We had previously discussed what we would like to do so, with a few tweaks he had a plan. He paved outside the conservatory door with some very nice Indian sandstone and then made a raised area which, since we’d had such difficulties with grass in the past and we were the proud owners of yet another mad Irish Setter, he covered with the aforementioned fake grass. By the time I returned home it looked perfect. Finally, the garden I’d always craved. But was it? 

Over the intervening years I have invested in pots and tubs of all shapes and sizes which have been filled with herbs, small shrubs, annuals, perennials, you name it, I’ve tried it. And most of them have died within a season. I bought a gorgeous smelling rose which has never done anything other than thrown off a few weedy blooms each year. My flowering currant got some kind of mould and died, the St John’s Wort keeps going rusty, the prickly shrub; we don’t know what it is, we bought it by mistake; keeps losing its leaves and the last remaining fuchsia is so pathetic it may as well not bother. There have been a few successes over the years, the wisteria has gone mad and has taken over Danii’s garden as well as ours, the cotoneaster needs a regular haircut, the rowan tree is thriving, the foxgloves pop up everywhere and the orange blossom has survived despite everything it’s been through. Along with the pots we put in a tub water feature with a couple of water plants and grasses which have always done well despite Alfie drinking the tub dry every day which wouldn’t be so bad but he’s got a bowl of clean water in the kitchen.

We even installed a hot tub in the summer of 2015 which meant we lost the decking space. It was worth it though for the one season. Come Autumn we converted the stable and moved it inside so we could use it all year round. And that’s where it stayed until we slowly used it less and less.

But still my biggest bugbear was that holly tree. By now it was over twenty feet tall and about twelve feet across. Even in the height of summer it cast a huge shadow over the garden. It must have taken up the whole of the tiny garden it was in. Then, about four years ago, on dropping Netti and the kids off after a day out, we were standing in Netti’s back garden when we both noticed something missing. That bloody holly tree had gone! All that remained was a stump. I nearly broke my neck running home to see if Paul knew what had happened to it. He’d been in the house all day and not heard or noticed a thing! The garden was now bathed in sunlight and it even reached in to the dining room again. The holly has grown again over time but Paul gives it a regular trim once the blackbirds have finished nesting. 

Then there was the laurel. What started out as a medium sized shrub had become this behemoth of a thing taking up a quarter of our garden and stretching over the wall into the next door garden, over our back fence, across the ginnel and hanging over the garden behind. It was huge. And I had the cheek to moan about the holly tree. Not only was it pushing the fence down but the space underneath had become a general dumping ground for garden waste. And it was right where the evening sun hit the garden. Last summer Paul decided to replace the rotting fence along the back and there was no way he could dismantle the old fence without chopping back the laurel. Not an easy task. In the end we had to ask Cain, now a strapping young man who lifts weights and fills any doorway, to come to our aid. It took a good two days to clear it all and get the new fence up, even with the assistance of Cain and Joey. At this point we still had a “shrub” and I suppose it could have been retrained but I resented the loss of garden space. Over winter I convinced Paul we needed to get rid altogether. It has now all gone apart from one stump which we can’t dig out since it’s roots now run under the dividing wall.

Fast forward to last week. The weather has been fine, warm and sunny; just the sort of weather that makes you want to sit out in your garden. Well ours had become a bit of a mess again. I don’t know how it does but it does. Before being able to sit out I had to clear a space for my chair. Then I was getting annoyed because I was looking at more mess. And one thing lead to another. I wanted to dig out the bed where the laurel had been so it was level with the grass. My plan was to put a nice bench in the space created so we could sit in the evening sun. Paul started to clear away the rocks where we’d tried to make a rockery before the laurel took over and as he piled them up he had this idea to re-create the rockery to one side of the space. We then had our Eureka moment. It was the ideal spot for a pond. Our little water feature was OK but the plants had outgrown the small space and we now had the room for a decent pond to try and attract some wildlife. And I’ve always wanted a nice pond. Whilst Paul worked on the pond, in a very organic way since he had no set plan, I busied myself by re-arranging the pots and planters. The most difficult to place was the Christmas tree as it is likely to spread a little. Next I dug up the weedy rose, replanted it in a pot and put it in a sunnier spot. It will either grow or it won’t. Some herbs have been repotted and the palm tree has had a haircut and I’ve created two more flower beds. All the old timber Paul had hidden under the laurel is now in the garage waiting to be taken for use down on the allotment. And the pond looks spectacular. So now, 25 years and several incarnations later, the garden looks good from every angle and we now have several little areas to sit and relax, from the early mornings on the decking to the late evenings by the pond.