So, what have we covered so far? Spring Bedding certainly. Iceberg Roses also, although I have kept back part of that story for later. The beds on the south side which had lain fallow for the previous couple of years, and which we planted with an ultimately unsuccessful scheme based on silver foliage, and eventually replaced with a collection of tender Salvias. We have discussed how pastel colour schemes work, and I have gone in some detail into the art of pruning, even into the large-scale heavy pruning of background evergreen trees. All of these projects have been followed to their conclusion, so you can see how the long-term planning works out. I think only one further area we tackled in that first winter remains to be described.
Turf maintenance. There is no way we could tackle the work that this required in the first autumn, because we didn't have the equipment. We had no mini-tractor that we could use on the lawns, we had no slitter or spiker, no scarifier and no satisfactory means of distributing fertiliser, especially not of the type I intended to use. So the first months were spent, not working on the lawns, but badgering my boss for the money to buy the equipment. Obviously, there was no funding available for this, my appointment having been set up out of a desperate reactive need, with limited forward planning. I eventually got the money, around £12,000, and the first arrival was a bright orange mini-tractor, fitted with a trailer, turf tyres, a front-loader and a dual-acting spool valve for the proposed slitter, which not only had to lower to the ground, but had to continually press down on it while in use. The tractor was chosen in competition with others for being the smallest with sufficient power for the job, with by far the tightest turning-circle of any. This was essential if it was going to be used on our narrow grass paths. It also had to have hydrostatic transmission, i.e. no clumsy clutch and gearbox, but smooth transitions from forward to reverse with a simple touch of the foot. All this revolutionised our capabilities around the garden, from grass maintenance to shifting vast amounts of woody prunings and transporting lorry-loads of mulch.
The garden was laid out on approximately three and a half acres of fine turf lawns and similar footpaths, and it was my intention to treat them to a modified tennis-court standard of maintenance. This was absolutely appropriate for a garden of the 1930's to 1950's period, but involved us in a huge amount of work each year. All the mowing was done with fine-turf cylinder mowers, theoretically with a smart striped finish. Apparently meetings had been held where it had been discussed whether or not we should change the maintenance regime completely and do all the mowing with a tractor-mounted rotary mower. Well, that wouldn't have been historically appropriate, would it? I wasn't going to stand for that.
The first thing I did after getting the tractor was to spend a few hundred pounds on spray equipment with which to fertilise the lawns. If you hear the word 'spray' and wince, thinking only of chemicals, then think again. Of course, the lawns of a period garden like this did have to be weed-free. The whole reason why this kind of garden became possible in the first place was because of advances in technology and chemical science which allowed standards which could only be dreamed of in earlier times. So, yes, I did use chemicals on the lawns. As an organisation, and for myself as a gardener, we were always searching for ways to retain the same standards with less use of chemicals, or the use of less noxious ones, but we had to balance history against that. The main reason why I needed a sprayer, though, was in order to introduce a more environmentally-friendly way of fertilising, one which I had started using in my previous job. I wanted to use liquid seaweed, which is full of trace elements which promote strong, healthy growth without stimulating an excess of foliar extension. It is the way of things that someone, somewhere will discover that extracting seaweed from the sea is also environmentally damaging, and an alternative will have to be found. That is an eternal cycle - you try your best, and it is never good enough. The only way to cure it is to banish the human race altogether, and with it the excessive demands it makes on the planet it calls home. But please, in my obituary in The Times, will you put, 'A man who tried'? Anyway, the effect on the lawns was very satisfactory, and they had their first spray just before we opened for that first season.
Remember the dried-out, worn-out grass I had inherited?
It wasn't that long before it was restored to this -
Same area, after one, or possibly two applications of seaweed fertiliser in August of the same year. The pathetic fountain in the pond, by the way, was mains fed, and illegal, not being a recycling system. We capped it off in subsequent restoration work on the pond, which I hope to show later. Note how the lilies are trying to climb out of the water, a sure sign of overcrowding and insufficient depth of water.
No comments:
Post a Comment