Day 111 - Here be dinosaurs

Right from the start I have to tell you that this was a very ordinary garden. Like an enlarged version of your granny's council house patch, with a couple of fruit trees, some roses down the side and once upon a time a few veggies growing in long rows. And lawns, poorly looked-after, connected by paths full of weeds. It had never had any horticultural quality. People told me that one of the gentlemen who lived there had liked the garden and was involved, but it was clear that it had never been taken seriously. It had been maintained on locally-obtainable labour and given no more than the basics. The grass was cut, the weeds were weeded, the hedges were trimmed, and all of it badly. There had once been a kitchen garden, before the owners died, but that had long since ceased to exist and was now a rough grass rectangle. The fruit cage was collapsing, contained very little fruit and was riddled with weeds, and the orchard was more than half dead, with substantial gaps in the regular layout.

The gardeners shed was a disgrace, and it was barely possible to enter it, let alone reach the far end where there were all kinds of tools which had not been used in years. All my photographs are in date order, as I was getting better at this by now, so instead of taking you through the restoration area by area as I have done before, this time I shall show you the range of activities I was working on simultaneously. Let's see if that works, or is even possible.

I have a whole folder of 'befores', demonstrating the humble beginnings I started from. Humble is too kind a word. It was an overgrown mess, even though there were people there who thought gardening was being done while it was getting in that state.

We walk from my house towards the main house, passing on the way the gardener's shed/workshop on the right of the picture, behind it a nursery patch, mostly down to weeds -

The view from my back garden towards the same shed shows the overgrown evergreen backdrop to the borders, the collection of council car-park shrubs and a misplaced bench taking in a view of nothing anyone would want to look at -

The far end of my garden was like the Lost World. Here be dinosaurs -

Then, looking back up past the shed, from the bottom of my garden, we see the remnants of the old fruit cage on the left. It had very little netting remaining, the metalwork was bent, and apart from weeds there were a few scrawny vegetables, which the staff in the office had been treating as their own, albeit expecting the gardener to harvest it for them, free of charge -

At the far end of the area, by the back gate, was a little 1960's cottage used as a holiday let, the garden of which was almost empty except for a tangled Wisteria and some self-sown herbaceous near-weeds  -

Oh, and I almost forgot until prompted by pictorial evidence, the garden shed had a lean-to greenhouse attached, which sounds rather a grand concept, but is actually illustrative of the quality of what I was working with. Have a look at this and tell me if you can see any way to describe it, other than as a skanky allotment gardener's shanty town of self-built ruins -

Well, that takes you behind the scenes to the working areas and the private house next door, all of which everyone else seemed to be able to turn a blind eye to, but which in fact constituted part of my work.

Now we progress to the main garden, the piece we were supposed to be proud of. I suppose I should grudgingly admit that it was noticeably better than what we have just seen, but only in patches, and certainly not up to the standards I would require if I didn't want to be embarrassed to be seen standing there. First we come to the kitchen garden. By this time it was no more than a small hedged field. Beyond the hedge was a further compact section with a couple of trees in the grass, and some real oddities such as Fuchsias planted in rough turf. I would be revising that later, putting in Medlar, Quince and suchlike, and removing the Fuchsias, planting the turf with various bulbs -

Perhaps you think that doesn't look too bad, but in fact all the evergreen backdrop was far too tall for the setting and shading out the borders as well as collapsing under the neglect. The box hedges were in poor condition and riddled with lesser bindweed, and there was a boring square of grass where once there had been vegetables. This is how it looked from another angle -

From there it was possible to access the main (west) lawn via a hedged path which did not sell itself well -

The little summer house at the end was a dumping ground for all kinds of rubbish which couldn't be crammed in the gardener's shed. Looking up towards the house from there past a near-deceased cherry tree, was a bed, almost completely strangled by ivy on the left, under which, struggling for survival, was a fine ancient Mulberry tree, which it was my joy to rescue later -

The main lawn, frankly, was a dull place, an expanse of weedy, mossy, pale yellowish green most of the time, around which very little grew in the borders. It was bounded on its southern edge by two over-large Portugal Laurels which had been persistently cut up to access the borders and had a browse line like trees in a cow pasture -

Seen from the other end, there was a mature Irish Yew, with an ill-placed undersized sculpture hidden under it. From here it is possible to glimpse the interesting but appallingly-constructed single-skin foundationless pierced brick wall that separated the area from the kitchen garden. I would be making the best of that feature later on, assuming it didn't fall down before I got there -

Note the curving bed in the foreground here. Those are all weed seedlings there. Not a plant to be seen.

Skirting round the house to the South, we come to the Rose Terrace, which observant readers will notice has no roses at all at this stage, all the beds being empty. Apparently they had been making do with bedding plants for the last few years -

The view from the terrace we shall call the South Lawn, for the sake of being able to identify it later when I show you what I did with it. In the meantime, it hardly qualified for a name of any description -

Over on the right there was a large of bed of boring Viburnum tinus which would have to go, as it ate into the breadth of the lawn and sat obscuring part of the view from the terrace.

I've said the Rose terrace wasn't all that great. Here's my proof, looking back from the South -

Beyond this area was the Orchard, which still just about hung on to its right to be called one, despite being partly planted with irrelevant shrubs where half the trees had died out over the years -

There was also a small formal pond nearby off to the right, with a couple of lost sculptures of diminutive proportions, and an infestation of reeds and blanketweed. It's in the next shot, over where the Yuccas are -

A small sheltered area was behind the pond at the back of the Library, where a skinny bronze of a naked adolescent hid bashfully amongst the trees, but again the plantings were poor and took no advantage from their enclosure -

Looking back, this was what you saw -

The limitations of the Orchard were evident from that angle, and more especially from this -

Between the main house and the ancillary buildings which housed the offices, exhibition space and library was a courtyard, containing various Clematis and sad old Roses, and at the far end on the right one hopelessly tangled Wisteria, which I was going to enjoy myself with later -

The front entrance was a simple lawn with a Chestnut tree as its centrepiece, mainly used as a feature for people to drive over and park on. I used to get very angry with the philistines who persisted in doing so. It's the front entrance for God's sake, it needs to look good. It needs to welcome people, not look like a dirt-track in the woods -

From there, heading back to my house, you crossed the tennis court, which hadn't been used seriously for over thirty years, I think, since the owner died. At the end of it was an area under trees where the gardener dumped his rubbish in full view. It was six feet high in debris, and measured something like 20m x10 at its widest point -

To the left of it was rough woodland, and to the right a very poor, narrow border, majoring in weeds and boredom.

At the end of the tennis court lawn, if you carried straight on, you were back at my house, and if you turned right you reached the fruit cage, from the other end -

As you can imagine, my hands were shaking with excitement by the time I reached the dump, and I'm afraid the photo to come is out of focus due to the tremors -

There was a bit of spare timber piled up there too, on the right in the next pic -

But hey, I'll be showing you some better stuff tomorrow. What you have seen is the degradation which made it an attractive project for one such as myself.