None of these improvements occurred on the main Rhododendron slopes. I had no say there. I had very little anywhere else either, except inasmuch as I tidied things up that the boss had no interest in. This was mainly in the kitchen garden, which was not his domain, being altogether too fussy for his broad-sweep mentality. He liked to chop down utilitarian forest specimens and grow large shrubs and ornamental trees in their place. He wasn't really geared up to detail, which is why the garden as a whole didn't work. I've said it before - other people's big picture is made up of my small details. Unfortunately, they never apply themselves enough to learn how that works. That is what this blog has been all about.
The place I came to was 100% a restoration project, even though my employer didn't realise it. It was never going to be possible to convince him that what he had was not a garden, but a failed project, a dull sterile collection, so I just had to knuckle down and get on with it behind the scenes.
First the greenhouses. You already know they were in shocking repair and highly dangerous. The interiors were no better than the structure. Rotting boards for benches, pest and disease-ridden plants for decorating the house, and the only thing getting any attention, as usual, was the tomato plants. Look at the lemon trees, covered in sooty mould, caused largely by a plague of scale insects -
I had to clean every leaf individually with soft soap and cotton wool. I also had to prune back the growth which was colonising the paths between the benches.
The boss was quite proud of his vine, which was planted outside and trained back through a hole in the wall to cover the whole of the roof of one end of the house. Fine if you didn't look too closely. On the other hand a keen eye would see it as a colony of mealybugs and scale insects on sticks, and I had a long project there with the soft soap too, and dilute solutions of meths, as well as pressure-jet spraying them to blast them off the plants from inaccessible positions -
The peach, too, was infested with scale and poorly-trained, which I immediately tried to address with results no better than can be expected with the start I had -
I had never seen a place with such an inefficient arrangement of heating pipes, or a more crammed and uninspired collection of indoor plants -
They don't actually look that crammed here, as I had already thrown a lot of them out before taking this picture, but what I said about the heating system goes -
As for the outside, that was a typical old-fashioned long-bed crop rotation system that dated back to the ark, with a few ornamental borders thrown in. The trouble with the long beds here was that as it never stopped raining, and you had to walk up and down the beds to do any work on them, you were forever collecting six inches of mud on your boots and compacting the soil severely. This was probably the best reason for the appalling weeding, which at least gave you something clean to stand on. The crops were all grown traditionally, with tall peas scrambling up through long fences of wire-netting, which made weeding impossible and picking awkward. The potatoes, in the soggy climate, were perpetually blight-ridden and the whole garden was as depressed as I was. As for the hedges, I had my usual complement of overgrown plants, all fluffy, rounded, shapeless and collapsing. In addition, the fruit cages were weed-infested and so poorly maintained that they were full of birds most of the time, struggling to get out, anywhere away from there, I surmise. Have a look at a few of my 'befores' -
Nice lop-sided arch, wonky hedges, crap fruit cage, empty beds and weeds. Got the lot in one. Oh, and soggy.
Fine structures (!), muddy trodden paths, plants not thriving and weeds again. Then in the next picture, more long, long rows in the mud -
Even in the central feature, the roses were not thriving, and to add to the effect, the whole thing was overlooked by the shepherd's ugly, scruffy shearing barn -
So that's what I had to work with. I didn't waste much of my life on it, but I wish I could have the time back. What I could do with those five months. Tomorrow, I will show you the futile, underappreciated efforts that I wasted my time on before escaping, then that will be an end of it.
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