Day 117 - Little boxes

It was by now April, and I was going to have to get a shift on if I was going to make anything of the kitchen garden in time to grow any produce. If you remember, this was just a rough grass rectangle behind some equally rough box hedges, and the area had not served as productive ground for years. Well, it seemed to me that if I was tasked with restoring the place to look as if it still had the original owners living there, as part of the museum/shrine that the buildings formed, then the least I could do was to reinstate the part that produced their vegetables. There was an old photograph which came to me too late, thankfully, showing the veg being grown in an ugly traditional kitchen garden, with long rows stretching right across the whole area. Fortunately, I did not see this until long after I had designed something completely different and infinitely more workable not to mention modern. I decided to turn the space into a series of separate beds in a symmetrical layout, linked by grass paths. Each bed was, I think, eight feet wide, and the centre of the beds could be reached from either side without treading on the soil. At any rate, I could reach the centres, at 6'1", and I wasn't planning for anyone else. This was my garden till I retired, or so I thought.

By this time, on the 2nd April, I had already laid out the shape of the new beds, and had cut small channels out  to mark the edges, in exactly the same way as I did in my first Head Gardener's job so many years before, which you can read about as far back as Day 7 in this report. Or better still, why not start from Day 1 and live through it all? The marked beds gave me the pattern to work to, and if they needed any adjustment, I could just slot the turf back in and recut them -

The layout involved a central circular bed, ringed by a circular grass path. There were then 12 rectangularish  beds (curves were cut out to accommodate the centre circle) laid around the central focal point. These were connected by narrow lateral paths and separated into two halves by a central path at right angles to these, which connected with the central circular path. It will come clear in later photos. My plan was to grow annual flowers for ornament in the centrepiece, and to institute a six-crop rotation in the others, with two beds for each type of crop. The ends of the beds would contain perennial vegetables which could stay in situ year on year. I don't know if the next picture will make it any clearer -

The little area next to this, which consisted of rough grass with a Viburnum and a couple of Fuchsias incongruously planted in it, had benefited from a complete rethink and I had planted a Medlar and a Quince in their place and augmented the bulbs. At least now it looked as if it had some connection with the kitchen garden, by virtue of the presence of edible fruits -

That shot is looking back towards the house. The link to the kitchen garden is more obvious here, in the next photograph, which also shows the perimeter path of the veggie plots marked out -

One week later, other significant improvements were starting to take shape, and we can now see how the lawn opposite the terrace was supposed to work as an enclosure to the view, with its narrow waist and swelling hips -

The Medlar and Quince were accompanied by a fruiting cherry, and the following illustration shows just how compact five acres could be, with all the areas I have described being very close to one another. This increased the necessity to have discrete areas screened from one another, so visitors could linger and not feel they had seen everything at once. Here we can see just how close the productive garden was to the holiday cottage -

Before progressing with the vegetable garden in tomorrow's post, there are just a couple of things which I had begun by this stage and which were beginning to have an effect. They both involved grass. Where I had removed the old fruit cage, I had sown grass seed the year before, and planted an ornamental border to separate the area from the main East Lawn. It was now no longer the considerable eyesore it had been when the dilapidated fruit cage had still been almost standing, but it was plain and uninteresting. I decided to liven it up with some creative mowing, and I cut serpentine patterns in it at different heights. It wasn't a huge statement, but people liked it, and I had fun making it -

Of course, I still had to demolish the sheds to make it look right, but I was working on that. I was negotiating to store my equipment in the garage, which at this time was no more than a dump for the archive. Imagine the same place without the sheds, by looking at it from the other end -

Now, the orchard was an area I had long held plans for, and these were beginning to take shape too. The great advantage of being planted on a grid pattern, was that it allowed me to be creative with the mowing. I had begun to cut paths between the trees shorter than the surrounding turf, which created a chequer-board of long grass squares between the rows. These I planted, each square with a different variety of bulb. You won't see those yet, but the following spring they came into their own. In the meantime the format was revealing itself through the summer, giving texture to an otherwise flat area of grass -

But oh, how close those bungalows looked now that I had reduced the toppling hedge to get it to thicken up -

The garden had been so overgrown when I came for my interview, that I had gained no impression at all of how surrounded it was by little boxes. I was responsible for revealing them, and it came as a shock to me. Future planning would involve hiding them again.