A WEEK IN MY GARDEN - 8 AUGUST - COME INTO THE GARDEN

Next weekend the garden is open for the National Garden Scheme, raising money for nursing charities and for our local church through the sale of tea and cake.  It's been like spinning plates, trying to get everywhere looking good at the same time.  But I think we are nearly there.  

The Front Garden - with white and yellow Roses and ancient Yew

This week I'm going to tell you a little of how the garden came into being.  Just a little so you don't get too bored.

The Stables Borders

I wanted to make a garden that in tune with the house it surrounds, which is a Victorian red brick house built in the 1860s.  It is not a grand house, nor is it very small.  It is surrounded by fields, mainly cattle pasture, but some arable too.  A typical English country village.  I wanted my garden to be traditional, not too grand and rather romantic.  Roses were a definite for their beauty, perfume and history.

The Rose Garden

I would like visitors to imagine it is an old garden that has been like this for 150 years.

The previous owners had covered a lot of the garden in gravel to make hard standings for portacabins and a car park for staff.  It looked horrible.  I decided that there was to be no more hard landscaping.    So anything that you see, and it is mostly just gravel, was already here.  

The Potager - former site of the portacabins

The final thing that determined how the garden should look was the matter of funds.  This was a garden that was to be created with some degree of economy.  It's never going to be cheap to plant 2.5 acres, but most of it has been planted with home grown plants or small bare root plants. 

The Long Border - the majority of plants were bare root or grown from seed.

The Knot Garden - the Standard Photinia were from Morrisons

The topiary was grown from 2ft hedging plants, and is a little imperfect, but it's getting there.  

We were fantastically lucky to have all these mature trees to make the garden seem established.  

The Mulberry Tree is vast and I like to think a survivor of the original Victorian garden.

Mulberries ripening on the tree

A country garden should have an orchard too, and here is ours.

The Orchard

Apples, Medlar and Greengage trees have been planted here, and the Greengage has fruited for the first time this year.  

That wasn't too long was it?  You've reached the end, and I must get back to the weeding as there are just a final few of those annoying little fiddly euphorbia things to dispose of.  Thank you for reading.  I'll be in the thick of it next weekend so next week's post will be a couple of days late, but I will be sure to report how it all went.