Honestly, I was too old for this kind of work. You are working to deadlines not dictated by the seasonal growth of plants, but governed by the estimating skills of your boss. The pressure to get business leads to times being pared down to the minimum and very heavy work having to be done at a superfast rate.
I was lucky, as my particular skills had led to me being employed in the maintenance section, so mostly I was out on my own doing what I was best at. Only occasionally did I get drawn into landscaping contracts with their soil-shifting, concrete-mixing, fence-erecting and slab-laying demands, and I am glad of that. That work is tough going if it is priced to put you under pressure. I was 53. The other guys were in their 20's and 30's. I kept up, because I was a tough and fit old soul, but found it hard going. The other thing I managed to avoid most of was the water-garden work, which was something of a speciality of the firm, but not of mine. Glad I missed that.
A few people in the area got their gardens well-tended by me for six months, but there was no way I was going to last in this work. I was desperate to get back into large historic gardens, so much so that I jumped at the first job that came along, and very soon wished I hadn't. I'll be telling you about that over the next couple of days. In the meantime, I'm going to show you a couple of pics of the house we moved into after the sudden end of my previous contract, with its tied house.
We took a while to find somewhere. Under the Scottish system, we had to put in offers over the guide price for houses, and at the time the market was fierce. Every offer we made was topped by someone with more money than us, sometimes prepared to go 50% over guide price. We couldn't compete. We eventually found a fixed price offer in our favourite village, for an ugly modern house hidden behind the main street, with a tiny garden. It turned out that this was a very well thought out place and it suited our needs perfectly. It was also cheap to run, being extremely well-insulated, and with the improvements I made to the little patches of garden front and back, we were able to make it look quite attractive, the moreso for it not being possible to stand back and look at it from a distance, such was its placement behind other buildings with access through a narrow vennell. Yet we still had views of the hills at the front and the river out of the back. We were situated right at the north end of the Cheviots at the very end of the Pennine way. It really doesn't get better. The estate agents made it look like this when we came to sell it later -
From the front you couldn't see much of it. The house is invisible to the right. The cat (not ours) is sitting by the front door -
And this was the back garden, newly-planted -
It was quite young in that shot, but we had gone for bold foliage statements, despite the limited size, and unseen on the right, I was using my formidable skills as a trainer of climbers to hide the house completely under foliage and flowers and perfumes. It was a lovely place to sit, and was only going to get better.
Down the side path I was fan-training Wegela decora as well as a host of other plants including Passion Flowers, Abutilon megapotamicum and various pieces I can't remember -
Our private entrance through the vennell, shared with the couple next door, was looking good too -
Almost all my interior photos are out of focus, the next being the exception -
The kitchen was a comfortable kitchen diner, overlooked by a huge hill on the other side of the village, and the views out the back were passable too -
We were very happy here. It was a great village, with all the necessary amenities - shop, garage, butcher's, pub. I can think of no reason ever to leave. Other than desperate circumstance. Exacerbated by poor employment in the area.
I'm an idiot! Of course it was our cat. It's just that she never came in the house, so I didn't really associate her with the place! she died a few years back at the age of somewhere around 19 I think.
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