Day 104 - On fire

It all sounds perfect, doesn't it? I had really landed on my feet in two nice little gardens that needed my kind of intervention. My creative buds were popping left, right and centre. We lived in a beautiful small town in a beautiful area. What could go wrong?

Well, it wasn't all straightforward. The involvement with the large holiday let turned out to be very stressful. I couldn't bear to witness the damage this caused to our work in the gardens, and, because I lived across the road, I never felt off duty, which becomes very wearing after a while, particularly if you are being pestered continually to come and fix things on your days off.

For this reason, we had begged for and been granted permission by the management to find our own accommodation in another village locally, to allow us some space from the job. This would then free up our house to increase property income as another holiday let perhaps. I didn't even consider the fact that effectively my income would be substantially reduced by this, as I would lose the value of the nominal rent that was included in my wage plan. I was just desperate to regain a private life for at least a couple of days a week.

In the end, we did move into our own property, but not under the circumstances we had envisaged.

I was doing some summer pruning in the orchard, in this case working on a fan-trained plum tree against the wall. You can't prune stone-fruit during the winter at the same time as the apples and pears, because of the threat of letting in silver-leaf disease, so I was doing this in late August or early September. I was pruning out a dead branch, which had decayed to a paper-like consistency in places, when the wood gave way, and the saw slipped, carving a gouge out of my index finger. I knew instantly that something bad had happened, even though it didn't particularly hurt, and I got someone to call my wife at work to pick me up and take me to the hospital. I had severed a tendon.

The treatment involved an immediate operation, followed by fifteen weeks off work and intensive and very painful physiotherapy, which was much worse than the original injury.

Fine, you'd think, wouldn't you? It's only the finger. I live just down the road from work. They can call on me if they need any decisions. I'll be able to keep an eye on the place. I'm not mentally impaired by this. I can still do part of the job.

Now, I've told you about team tensions. I felt I was being pretty effective in keeping these at bay. After all, it was one of the declared job objectives I had been presented with - to sort out the team and its morale. Well, while I was off it only took days for it all to flare up again. I was approached at home by a member of staff with a serious, but obviously spurious, allegation against another member of staff and was asked, or more challenged with, what I was going to do about it. Knowing it was all nonsense, I said I had no intention of doing anything about it, and made it very clear that that was my final decision, thinking that would be an end to it. Not so. The aforementioned member of staff was not satisfied with my answer, and wishing to make mischief for the other worker, went over my head to a higher authority. The way the structure worked, this was the same person who had nurtured most of the staff tensions in the first place. A decision was taken which compromised the person in our team undeservedly, lent support to the machinations of the person raising the allegation and completely undermined my authority. My protests that having a damaged finger in no way impeded my critical faculties or my ability to manage staff issues fell on deaf ears, on the grounds that if I was signed off sick, I was not allowed to work at all, in any of my areas of responsibility. The place had reverted to type and I had no choice but to tender my resignation.

I will show one final photograph to show what I was leaving. It is the view from the front door of our tied cottage one afternoon when the hills caught fire -

I have nothing like that here on a housing estate in the flatlands of the east. And we both miss it.

Day 103 - A big squash

The scope of what I was able to initiate in the orchard and dried flower garden was limited. They already had their defined purpose, and it would have been wrong to try and change that. All I could do was try to improve morale by keeping the warring factions apart and stimulate the enthusiasm for the basic horticultural tasks the place needed. That was easy. Beyond that, I took charge of the climbers in line with my personal enthusiasm, and tried to do something about improving the incorporation of our horticultural endeavours into the scope of the retail department. By doing so, I hoped to create a non-hostile link between the indoors and the outdoors. At the moment the dried flower sales had been pushed to the far end of the shop where customers seldom went, in favour of displaying biscuits, smelly things and tea towels. Now I am prepared to accept that these were probably the best sellers, but as the only dedicated dried flower garden in the country, I felt we had an obligation to showcase our wares. Linked in to all of this was my desire to put our vegetable and fruit sales on to a proper retail footing amongst other things.

During the winter, with the help of my new team, I took the risk of making myself permanently unpopular with the retail people, by rearranging the far end of the shop, which was actually in a separate room from the main shop at the front. We brought dried flowers out of the shadows into the foreground, and let customers really see what we had to offer, including completed arrangements created by volunteers, and individual components on sale for people who wanted to make their own. We also made arrangements to order, and did a few to furnish the late Tam Dalyell's House of the Binns -

These were nice exuberant displays, but very traditional, and I began to put out feelers to see if there was anybody who would like to join us to experiment with a more avant-garde style, or try something influenced by Japanese Ikebana perhaps. Anything to get us away from the fossilised Victorian house atmosphere most people think of when they imagine dried flowers. We didn't find anybody, and I'm not sure they have yet. If you have that kind of creative imagination, I'm sure there's a vacancy still. Unpaid of course!

Anyway, I lived to see the dried flowers assume more prominence in the ethos of the place, which was only fitting, as it was what the organisation had been given, and was what constituted the unique character of the property. That and its orchard of historic fruit varieties. These came into their own in October.

I did initiate one other novelty that first winter, bringing with me some of the skills I had learned in my previous job. Although I hadn't involved myself in making Christmas wreaths there, but had concentrated on all important admin work, I had observed the two gardeners making wreaths in the traditional style. In that job this task had kept them out of the bad weather and brought us a few pounds to spend on plants, but frankly was hardly worth the effort, except in keeping a tradition alive. In this job it was different, and seemed to fit in well with our other work producing displays of dried material for resale. Accordingly, I bought the necessary bits and bobs, and set about showing the staff and volunteers, including my partner (not yet my wife) how to go about it. I was pretty pleased with the results and a brisk trade was had at £16-50 each -

We made a number of different styles, so I will follow this with a few uncaptioned pictures to give an idea of the range of options on offer -

Then, as soon as produce was ready from the other garden in early summer, we started bagging it up and selling it from a trolley in the shade outside the shop. That was very successful and made good use of what we were growing right through until the Apple Day in October. This was an annual event, fairly well attended, and we had dozens of baskets of all varieties of the fruit we grew, giving people the chance to taste apples they had never even heard of. I also incorporated some vegetable sales and games into this, and in fact I met my future best man over a 'Guess the Weight of the Pumpkin' competition.

Day 102 - In a hurry

The smaller garden was a relatively straightforward task, although it was still in need of considerable revitalising, and was by no means a small job. Fortunately, there was, in the shape of the only gardener on a regular contract at the time of my arrival, a person with wide knowledge of the plants and the history of the garden. I was confident that if I could restore morale the place would be in safe hands and would only require direction from me.

The scope was quite limited. As far as I remember the area was slightly over two acres, the bulk of which was the orchard. There was a small scruffy woodland section which attracted nobody, and then the dried flower borders, which were quite compact in scale and were situated close to the shop. They looked like this when I first started the job -

Different views give an idea of the size of this feature. It was not big, and did not change substantially over the course of my time there -

From the other end of the path, looking back -

And that was it. Obviously the division of herbaceous plants that we undertook to provide material to grow in the other garden for cutting, rejuvenated the borders and created space, so after that first winter they looked more like this, but the layout did not alter at all -

The dividing of the plants was a task which had to wait till I had taken on my new team, as was the job of pruning the orchard. The fruit trees were desperately in need of work, and had become over-tall and congested -

There was a crowded feel to the planting, and visitors had to duck to pass in some places -

Also, some of the trees were on their last legs, with scarcely the energy to put out foliage -

Because the concrete wall in the picture above was part of the town's public toilets and belonged to the council and not to us, we couldn't train anything up it, so in a misguided attempt to disguise it, someone had come up with the idea of planting a border of grasses, which were a complete joke -

All it really would have required would have been a few more fruit trees planted close to and the wall would have disappeared from view, so I had the grasses removed.

The pruning task was addressed the first winter, and much to the chagrin of our volunteer who knew about these things, I had them treated severely. I had no time to wait  for a more leisurely, considered approach, even though at that time I thought I was in the job for the long haul. By the following spring the trees were much more accessible, having been reduced in height, and were more open in the centres, allowing light and disease-free air to pass through. Obviously, this winter pruning would stimulate a lot of growth, but I had that covered. I felt invincible, and confident that we would be able to manage the necessary summer pruning which would then restrict the vigour and bring the task back to manageable proportions once more. In March, before growth started, the orchard looked considerably more spacious than before, helped by the absence of leaves, I must admit -

It was even possible at that stage to get a good clear view of the Abbey through the trees. By June in full growth, it was still obvious that the work had contributed considerably to the feeling of space within the garden -

I went back last year and was pleased to see that the pruning seemed to have continued over the last ten years, and some work had been done in the woodland area, although neither garden had had major investment of the kind I had been hoping for during my time there.

Tomorrow I shall put up a short post with a couple of examples of the dried flower work we did, which was a curious departure from anything I had ever been involved with before.

Day 101 - Where's the money?

First an irrelevant picture -

It was the smaller of the two gardens which from the organisation's point of view carried most of the historic horticultural importance, with its orchard of old varieties and its dedicated dried-flower garden, and accordingly, the Gardens Adviser had drawn up a plan for its development which we were to implement when the money became available. However, for me, it was the larger garden which best suited my kind of experience and interest in laying out gardens in the context of their relation to a house. I got quite excited about the lack of enthusiasm shown generally for this project, and within three months of arriving, I had drawn up a plan for the development and improvement of the amenity, bringing the garden into some kind of unity with the building it served. My proposal was accepted in principle, and again was awaiting appropriate funding.

The problem with the garden as I saw it was that the house just sat there, above it, looking down on some relatively small lawns, and a parking space for a couple of cars. The more distant views were deliberately obscured by large trees, as the town lay between the house and the hills in the distance. In a much larger 18th century landscape setting, perhaps, placing the house in plain lawns might have worked, but here, there was no direction to it, nothing on which to focus and nowhere to lead your view. The house sat lop-sided in its setting -

Aspects I had to consider were the entrenched idea that the property would continue to stay afloat by holiday lets and weddings, so I had to provide opportunities for these. The current site for wedding marquees was slap in the centre of things, right where they would destroy the visual impact of the garden, and where visitors would stumble upon it immediately on entering the gate. Off to one side was a sunken lawn, which was historically a curling green, flooded in winter and allowed to freeze, so the owners could practice the locally popular sport of curling. This was large enough for a marquee, and I put it to the authorities that I would prefer this to be the site for such things in the future. I was ignored. They were insistent that the use of the property as a party venue was the main source of its income, and that we must give the punters what they wanted, even if it was ugly, ill-kept and in your face. The present site must stay. Well, as a gardener that's what you always get. Your job is to make it look pretty, and fix it when other people mash it up. You are a maintenance man. I was never going to get across my artistic calling to those people. Tin men, and women, with no hearts.

The plan I submitted looked as follows, and shows a new ornamental area centred on the front door of the house, with a (I hoped) modern sculpture as a focal point, and radiating sunburst beds opening out from, or narrowing in on, the house depending on which direction you were looking from -

The kitchen garden to the left was substantially how I laid it out that winter, except that the perennial veg area to the left, I incorporated at the end of the fruit cage, leaving the whole of the left side for dried flowers.

The advantage of the plan I had suggested was that it could be put in place at relatively low cost, as it had no structures at all, and only needed the sourcing and purchase of plants, many of which we would be able to grow ourselves quite cheaply. The sculpture and water feature could wait till later, once my point had been proved. I attached a written rationale to the plan before I submitted it, an extract of which follows:

'Where once the front door was aligned to double herbaceous borders (no longer in place, but providing historic precedent for focussing on the front door), now there is still a central axis, but one which encompasses the scale of the whole house, opening the view out from the building, whilst also focussing back to the house from the other end. The sunburst layout of the beds gives a symmetry which takes advantage of the architecture of the house being raised above the ground, giving views down onto the garden from the drawing room, dining room and the main bedroom. At the north end is a sculpture, modern and abstract, and at the other, a contemporary water feature (to be situated in the circle below the steps into the garden).

The sunburst theme is reflected in the purple western hedge, representing sunset, and the golden eastern hedge to represent sunrise, which also harks back to the original golden border in the garden.

The planting of the beds is to be informal, with the use of golden- and purple-foliaged plants in such a way that they are highlighted against the contrasting hedge. Flower colours to be mainly in the yellow, orange and purple range. There is scope to plant two arched walkways within the scheme, one hung with golden hop, the other with a purple vine. There should be glimpses into the area over the lower parts of the hedges to entice you in, with trees visible above the hedges.

The two hedges rise informally in three sweeps from one end to the other, evoking the nearby hills, the golden hedge to rise from south to north, and the purple one from north to south. Simultaneously, both hedges are to have a serpentine formation to recall the local river. When viewed across the bulb lawn, the lowest (middle) section of the two hedges will hold a view of the Abbey, in an apparent bowl.'

The document went on to describe a holistic concept for the garden.

To make my vision clearer I drew a rough sketch of the basics of the design. At that time, I had done no coloured pencil work ever, and I know my approach would be very different nowadays, now that I have experience and a certain amount of skill with the medium. Anyway, as ever, I am not embarrassed by my earlier failures, and attach said drawing here, because I think it might help to make the words clearer -

Two things to note - one is that the hedges rise in undulating form as well as snaking across the ground from side to side, and two, I have credited my wife with her initials, as she, with her design experience, had helpful input as I bounced my ideas around.

It would have been exquisite if it had got off the ground. More on that to come.

Day 100 - Quality at last

So far I've covered the rescue operations on the kitchen garden in the larger of the two gardens I was running. Now, in fact, there was an even larger portion of this site that was not productive, but was for ornamental and leisure purposes. Having said that, compared with what I had been used to in my previous job in one of the great but lesser-known English gardens, this was a pretty low-key affair. There was little of any particular quality or rarity, and the potential of the grounds had remained stubbornly unexploited by its history. The mixed flower and shrub borders were tired and uninspiring and limited in scope for the extent of the available ground. There were some overgrown scruffy borders leading to the back door of the house which were overrun with mint and some of the tougher herbaceous plants such as Astrantias. There was one long border separating the veggies from the lawns, again suffering from a lack of originality or interest, and a dull hedge of roses stopping parked cars from driving onto the grass. All round the perimeter a few trees were planted, which created dense shade, so little or no advantage had been gained by planting climbers on the magnificent walls that enclosed the garden. These walls were host to two features to be proud of. One was a fine fan-trained Apricot tree in a private area round the back, which looked great after I had pruned it into shape, but sadly I do not have a photograph of this, only of the more misshapen one in the public areas which I have already shown you. The other wall feature of note was not to be seen within the garden at all, but was on the outside of the North wall, facing the street, and was a wonderful display of Aubrieta, tenaciously hanging on to the lime mortar pointing -

Considering the almost total lack of moisture or nutrients, these were doing remarkably well -

Otherwise, the borders were fairly limited, and after quite a lot of work to sort out the spacing, control the weeds and mulch heavily to encourage growth, we managed to create a passably domestic look, which was all right, but a long way from the more elaborate professional displays I had grown accustomed to. From above the best of the borders looked like this -

There was still a lot of work to do on the climbers on the walls of the house, and I couldn't wait to get stuck into those -

I tried to inject some colour into the spring garden by the addition of clumps of Tulips -

and -

These interventions, combined with some of the existing plants, such as good groups of Fritillaria imperialis, gave us a broader show in the early part of the season -

but generally the effect was quite bland, and certainly not enough to set my pulse racing -

However, there was one excellent feature, which on my arrival the previous July had looked a complete mess of untended coarse grasses, and that was the bulb meadow. This turned out to be a very fine example, and to my mind was far better than the bulb areas I had left behind in my previous establishment. It had some rare Narcissi dating back,  I think, to the 1920's, and for which we did not have a name -

As can be seen from the next picture, the daffodils were planted together with fritillaries, which made an attractive mixture in May -

However, prior to that we had already enjoyed carpets of crocuses in March -

In addition to all this, we had extensive drifts of Erythroniums, or dog's-tooth violets, which presented their more subtle charms amongst the long grass -

Close-up, for the enthusiasts, they looked like this, with their attractive broad spotty leaves -

Later in the summer, after the bulbs had all died back, we cut down the grass, and the area assumed a quieter appearance. In order to achieve this effect, I had had to prune the trees to lift their crowns to let in more light and allow me to get beneath them with the ride-on mower. It was all worth it -

The perimeter was so shaded by large privacy plantings of mature trees, though, that it was difficult to envisage how to use the walls behind to increase the ornamental interest, so I concentrated on keeping the weeds down in the paths, mowing neatly beneath the trees, and clearing the debris that I had found stacked against the walls on my arrival -

This dump of grass clippings was perfectly compostable if interspersed with coarser herbaceous material and shredded and chipped prunings, and it certainly wasn't acceptable to keep dumping it in unsightly heaps around the outskirts of the garden. Simple tasks like that are as important to the rescue process as the more complex horticultural ones. After a while, people stop noticing how scruffy a place looks, and start accepting this kind of thing as normal. Fresh eyes on the situation make a difference, but it is also possible for each of us to train ourselves to have fresh eyes of our own, so we can prevent this happening in the first place. It is called caring.

As a final gesture, I shall show you the annual border which I sowed in the kitchen garden area, including the Aeonium as a centrepiece which I mentioned before. We now had an annual border in each garden, which was handy, as a number of these plants were useful for drying too. It is only young here, but I am sure you get the gist. Shortly it would be frothing with Sweet Peas, Cornflowers and all manner of bright specimens -

And that is all I have that I wish to show you of this garden. Tomorrow, I shall discuss a plan I submitted to increase the plant and visual amenity interest of the garden, which was accepted in principle but never implemented. Then I will move on to the companion garden a couple of hundred yards up the road.

Day 99 - All the colour you can eat

After all that heavy preparation work, all the other gardeners and I had to do was sit back and wait for everything to grow. And a bit of weeding, of course, mowing the lawns, propagating, pruning, watering (it was a rare wonderful summer), harvesting, bagging up for sale, planning future improvements......I could go on. I usually do. But not today. What I intend to do today is show you a few photographs of the kitchen garden in its full explosion of productive growth. All the pictures were taken in July, and testify to one of my deliberate intentions in the planning of the garden - I wanted it to serve an ornamental purpose as well as providing edible produce for sale. I already mentioned yesterday how I grew beans in a variety of colour forms to make them visually interesting. I also concentrated on putting colour into the brassica and salad borders as well.

So, one photograph after another with little comment between. First the fruit cage, now fully planted and with the protective netting in place -

And again -

Then a close-up, showing the fruit Scotland is rightfully renowned for, bags of which we sold that year in the shop -

We also managed to pick and sell some strawberries from our brand-new plants -

The dried flower border was thriving by now -

and as can be seen in this shot, we had already been harvesting shallotts and onions-

My approach to onion growing differed from what had been traditional in this and many other gardens. We were not growing for exhibition to produce huge bulbs which were of limited use in the kitchen. I wanted to sell people compact onions that would store well, so I planted the sets close together, at around 2-3" apart so that by harvest time they would be touching one another. I also placed the rows close together, about 6" apart, just enough to get the hoe between them. In this way I was able to lift a phenomenal amount of onions from a relatively small area, and they sold well. See how close, through a gap in the hedge which had once been a path -

As for colour, you can't beat salad crops. However, these weren't a reliable seller as we had no cold storage, and really needed to be lifted on demand which we couldn't manage -

But it was also possible to provide beauty in the brassica section too, as can be seen in these Kale plants, which late in the season provided a superb show. We also grew purple and yellow cauliflowers, which in this picture hadn't yet reached maturity -

In the root vegetable department too, beetroot could be relied on to provide a show, and here we grew purple, yellow and striped varieties, alongside purple, yellow and white carrots which looked good in the shop displayed beside the orange ones, even if they didn't show in the ground -

And let's not stop there - what about Swiss Chard? It doesn't get much better than that in your food garden -

The overall impression was lush, bright, full of colour. The setting was beautiful, and apart from the irritation of the misbehaving holidaymakers in the house, I'm not sure that I've ever been happier in my life. I would go back to live there in a shot. However, before I tell you how it all came to an end, I have quite a number of other gardening matters to show. Let's face it, I haven't even put up any pictures yet of the other garden, which was the one with the unique horticultural history, and I haven't dwelt much on the other side of this one, the ornamental or leisure garden. Plenty of time for that.