The Grand Tour #5: The Terraced Bit

Last but not least: the closest we get to a front garden. There is a bit to the right of the drive which is almost an afterthought: it's the sixty feet or so that occupies the gap between the drive and the garage. But it's actually the most formal of all the gardens: making its way down the hill by means of a series of rather lovely terraces, held in place by retaining walls, and - amazingly for this garden - more or less flat and straight.

This has given me delusions of grandeur. I have nowhere else in the garden where I can garden formally, and I have a bit of a soft spot for clipped box hedging. However I also need a cutting garden: so I am combining the two into....

The Parterre Garden

You can see the terracing better looking back up towards the house...


Imagine, if you will, a square (or maybe a rectangle) of box in the centre of each terrace, perhaps a curlicue or a squiggle, or an abstract pattern in the style of Tom Stuart-Smith at Broughton. I could even go for the raised look: they had some fine examples at Hatfield House on that Alan Titchmarsh programme the other week.

(Incidentally, they got their parterres and their knots hopelessly entangled in that programme. Repeat after me: parterre hedges have flat tops and a uniform height, knot garden hedges weave over and under each other. They had both on that programme, but Mr Titchmarsh went on and on about the parterres at Hatfield being knot gardens, and then they had a beautiful knot garden which he referred to as a parterre. Was I the only one shouting at my telly?)

Anyway. The point is, I shall fill the gaps in between with dozens and dozens of annual flowers for cutting: cosmos, love-in-a-mist, tulips, anthemis, sweetpeas, cornflowers, Ammi majus, some fennel and stocks and larkspur and.... you get the idea.


The log store, on the top terrace, is... well... less than edifying, and extremely overgrown. I may be commissioning my carpenter husband to do something deliciously gorgeous there instead. It has also, as you can see, been used as a compost heap by the previous lot of people, who kindly left their monster pile of garden rubbish for us to make use of - though I'm going to have to do a lot of shifting around into proper compost bins first.

There is also, according to the plans, a well under that compost heap. We await the alarmed cry and distant splash which will tell us it hasn't, after all, been capped off.

The plant life is little more than overgrown shrubs: some are quite nice. This cotoneaster is in very full berry...

...and there's a fine cotinus at the other end. Both, however, aren't quite nice enough to out-compete the parterres. Though the cotinus may find a new home somewhere: I do like them. Something to do with that chocolatey shade of purple.

And the inevitable rose. This one is fighting it out with a rampant clematis in the corner: so far it's survived against all the odds, so I have a certain admiration for such gritty determination. And besides, it's very pretty even in November. It stays. For now.

The Grand Tour #4: The Rocky Bit

Now, come out of the back garden for a minute and walk round to the front of the house. You will see that between the house and the road, there is.... I'm sorry... I'm going to have to say it....... a.....

rockery.

I hate rockeries. No - I really hate rockeries. They're full of piddly little plants which are lovely when self-seeded naturally into rocky outcrops in the Pyrenées or even, just, growing out of cracks in garden walls (I also have a garden wall in this section with a very fetching little thingy which I will entirely forgive for being there as it's where it's meant to be).

But when people start building great towering mounds of rocks and stuff them with little thingies which wouldn't normally grow in anything like that combination just to show them off in an anorak-ish sort of 'look what I've got!' way they are guilty not only of being 70s throwbacks in the worst possible sense but also of being insufferably smug, insensitive and - worst of all - unappreciative of what are in fact very beautiful little plants. I don't know why rockeries should be blamed for their owners' shortcomings, but there we are.

And besides, they're a bugger to weed.

There is a flimsy excuse for the existence of this particular rockery: it kind of holds back the lane which would otherwise tip rather disastrously onto our front door. There is a low wall at the front, and a high-up low wall at the back, in between which are lots of rocks and a few rather sorry-looking plants. So the Five Year Plan for this bit is to sweep rocks and such-like away to make way for....


The Herb Garden

I am being a little bit unfair as there are redeeming features. This is the far end (by the drive) and just the other side of that wall and the scrubby-looking shrubs there's a high-up sort of little lawn. It makes a very pretty spot: I can't be bothered to mow it (it's up steps, for goodness' sake) but it's a great excuse to plant some chamomile. I once had a chamomile lawn in my first-ever garden, a tiny town garden in Chiswick: it was about four feet by two feet but the scent as I walked on it has haunted me ever since.

And the steps themselves are rather nice: currently housing the poor dislocated plants hoicked out of my previous garden, dumped unceremoniously into containers and now hanging around aimlessly while I get around to finding somewhere to plant them.

I'm thinking lavender, trailing rosemary, and some interesting varieties of mint (in containers, of course, but possibly sunk into the ground either side).

This is an even longer and thinner bit of the garden than usual: about 60ft long, I reckon, by about 10ft from front to back. This is the bit to the right of the steps: no lawn, chamomile or otherwise here yet, but in the interests of symmetry I think all those blimmin' rocks may well have to make way for one. I could make it a creeping thyme one (Thymus serpyllum) just to ring the changes... though that might be overegging it. I am after all trying to restrain my usual instinct to cram in as many different varieties of plant as possible, in favour of something that looks a bit more, well, nice.

Actually it's not a very sensible place to have a herb garden, or not at the moment, anyway. That's because only the front edge, the bit by the house, actually gets any sun. I suspect however that these are the culprits.

Three of them. Honestly: whoever created this garden was almost certainly in the pay of those people who put together those 70s revival programmes on the telly. I suspect this trio of troglodytes were put in as dwarf conifers which, as they tend to do, just carried on growing after reaching their stated 5ft in 10 years. The two on either side are about 40ft high, the one in the middle about 30ft high. Between them they remove not only the light from my would-be herb garden but also most of the light from the house. They are, you will not be surprised to hear, going the way of the rocks.

Just one slightly tricky bit: this is a kind of extra bit of garden which joins the herb garden to the pot-pourri garden (cor get me, you wouldn't believe it was all an overgrown mass of shrubs and weeds scrapping it out at the moment, would you?)

I have no idea what to put in here. It's on the shady side, so my collection of scented-leaved pelargoniums aren't going to like it at all. My instinct is to put something in that's scented but also has uses for cooking, cosmetics or medicine - so bridging the divide between the two. All suggestions very welcome.

(that's a very spectacular Perovskia atriplicifolia 'Blue Spire' on the right, by the way, looking fetchingly ghostly at the moment now it's lost its powder-blue flowers).

Other redeeming qualities here:

Anyone know what kind of cotoneaster this is? Pretty sure it's a cotoneaster as it grows just like one - but look at those jewel-like purple berries. Just lovely.

A somewhat faded but pretty hydrangea (of the non-mophead variety: call me a culture snob but I do like my hydrangeas lacecap)

... and red valerian, self-seeded prettily around in the walls.

Oh yes, and this is that little thingy I was talking about; covered in tiny lilac flowers when we arrived and of course entirely un-gardened. Which is just as alpines should be.

The Grand Tour #3: The Shady Bit

Turn your back to the house once again, and look to your left: this is the side of the garden that lies in the lee of a steeply-sloping bank, topped with a hedge, the lane meandering by on the other side a good ten feet or so above head height. The 'lawn' stretches back from here, but in front is a little seating area: no good for chilly autumn or spring, when you require the full force of the sun, but wonderful in summer, I suspect, where the shade will be a welcome respite from all those 40°-plus temperatures we're supposed to be getting in a few years' time.

I introduce you to....

The Pot-Pourri Garden

It's not quite in full shade: the bit that wraps around to the garden path, to the right in this picture, actually gets sun for most of the day. It is for this reason that I've decided this should be the place for another long-held hankering of mine: a garden where all the plants can be used for pot-pourri. This idea may be fairly heftily modified in the coming months: it's quite likely, for example, that apothecary's rose (Rosa gallica var officinalis), a base ingredient for pot-pourri and one of my all-time favourite roses for its sumptuous, unforgettable scent, will not like my chalky soil here. But in the best gardening traditions I shall try, and probably err, until I get it right. At worst, I should end up with rather a nice scented garden: even nicer on those summer evenings.

For now, however, it is a sea of neglect: there has obviously at some stage in its dim and distant past been some love and attention, as there are some rather gorgeous things here such as a massive and beautiful clump of bronze rodgersia. But mostly, it's just a sea of cranesbill: and not even interesting cranesbill but the rampant wild form, which although pretty is a little tedious in these quantities.

There are other self-seeding lovelies, though, like this Meconopsis cambrica: a slender, delicate, tissue-paper-thin poppy of just the perfect shade of yellow which I have always struggled to grow elsewhere, yet here is growing itself. Perfect.

And astrantias are clearly happy too: it's just the common-or-garden kind rather than one of the more vividly-coloured selections, but nonetheless lovely for that.

And this rather handsome yellow-leaved shrub is glowing in the gloom: but I have no idea what it is. It's 4-5ft tall and hasn't done anything other than this, so far. I do like those deep purple stems, though. It is ringing a bell, I know I've seen it before somewhere and I probably ought to know its identity - but my poor overloaded mind is so far drawing a blank. Any ideas, anyone?

At the back is a fine variegated holly - it's right next to the Ginkgo I mentioned in a previous rambling, and the contrast between the Ginkgo's yellow autumn foliage and the yellow-and-green variegation of the holly is inspired. And it looks like we'll have holly berries for Christmas for the first time ever this year.

But what of the bank? I hear you say. There must, surely, be a bank?

Ah yes, but it is a gentle one: horribly overgrown and scrubby, but very sheltered and rather nook-like. I am seeing daphnes, violets, wintersweet and other lovely things tumbling over each other on the way down.

The Grand Tour #2: The Sunny Bit

Now for the one bit of my garden that is undeniably Very Sunny Indeed. It is on the south-facing side, there are, for once, no trees shading it, no house in the way, no high banks blocking out the sun. It isn't even concreted over. For this reason it is, the garden plan in my head dictates:

The Tropical Garden

(you are allowed to laugh)
Turn your back to the house, look a little over to your right, and you will see to one side of the path (the sunny side, natch) a flat bit. This is remarkable in itself as it is the only flat bit in the whole garden (apart from a concreted-over bit behind it, just visible to the left of the picture, which is where my garden office is going to go so that I can look out over this bit of the garden whenever I tire of my computer screen, which will be often).

It measures around 25ft x 40ft: not enormous, but quite big enough to house a selection of exotic and exotic-looking plants. I have for a long time nursed a secret hankering for a tropical edibles garden and this is going to be it.

At the moment my tropical edibles collection includes a big (and splitting) pot of yacon and a fig tree. Not very impressive, really. I hope to add ginger (Zingiber, proper ginger, not Hedychium - although I have two of those too which will no doubt go in there somewhere), some taro roots (Colocasia esculenta to you botanical types), edible passion fruits, kiwi vines, some acocha and a few bananas just for fun. The idea is that it will eventually be the kind of jungly mass of shoots, leaves and, no doubt, eats to pluck romantically from the vine as you waft through its sunshiny shade.

But all that is in the future: here, unfortunately, is it in its current unadorned state.

There is - of course! this is my garden! - a bank. A particularly steep, in fact nearly vertical bank at that. However: ever one to pluck opportunity from the teeth of a bloody ridiculous situation, I am getting quietly quite excited about this particular bank. I see vertical planting a go-go: beans tumbling down from soil pockets near the top, dangling their purple pods among clambering vines of kiwi, passion fruit and acocha.... now all I have to figure out is how to a) support the ones I'm not actually going to plant into the bank, and b) get the bank's current occupants - mainly stinging nettles and harts-tongue ferns - under control.

The emergency pond lives here, right at the front bit where it curves round to the house. I call it the emergency pond as Mango, who you can just about see under those iris leaves, only just survived the house move: poor old Peanut floated to the top of the rather inadequate fishtank they were living in while we got around to digging holes for ponds (not, admittedly, top of our to-do list on the day after the removal men left). After that and with the anguished wailing of small children echoing in our ears, the fishpond was in within two hours. And very nice it looks: I'm hoping the taro will drape rather elegantly over the edge of it in times to come.

There is a nod at planting: a slightly dislocated herb garden of mint, lavender, rosemary and sage all looking very healthy, if a little without context.

And a splash of colour from bedding. Flowering! In November!

The real splash of colour at the moment, though, is from this viburnum: I'm thinking x bodnantense 'Dawn' as it has the most incredible burnished bronze-purple autumn foliage.

And last but not least: some absolutely giant sunflowers. They must be (and I am not boasting here as I had nothing to do with growing them) 12ft tall. It bodes well for the fertility of the soil that they can pull this off in supposedly thin chalk: in fact I think sunflowers, being edible in both seed and seedling stages, definitely qualify for the tropical look.

The Grand Tour #1: The Hilly Bit

Some time ago I promised you a tour around my new garden in a little more detail. Well, now that we're here, there are no further excuses: so let me take you for a little wander around the garden I now call home.

Imagine if you will a very long and quite thin bit of land along the edge of a lane, south-facing but aligned more or less east-west, and about the shape of an aeroplane wing. It is tapered at each end and has a broader bit (to about 50ft wide) in the middle. Now plonk a house in the middle of the broader bit and divide the whole thing into three by means of a footpath running through a third from one end, and a garage interrupting another third from the other end, and you have the basic layout.

We have three main 'gardens' (though one is actually a field with pretensions - in my head anyway - to become an orchard): the first bit is my fledgling veg garden and I've already shown visitors to m'other blog around so you'll have to go have a look there if you're interested.

The next bit is the main garden: the bit that wraps around the house and is about a third of an acre, give or take a bit.

In my head it is already a beautifully-crafted, well planned and exquisitely planted garden of various different parts, so come with me in my imagination and contemplate:

Part 1: The Woodland Garden(aka The Hilly Bit)

By this I mean the back half of the back garden, which slopes gently upwards towards the footpath between it and what we call the top field. In this photo you'll have to avert your eyes from the large blue monstrosity in the middle: essential for keeping small children distracted, but a total eyesore. We have ambitious plans which involve terracing a bit just in front of the hill so we can move it back and to the side, and well out of the way.

Incidentally the 'lawn' (I use the term advisedly) is probably staying for a while at least, as there are rumours in the village of a spectacular display of sheets of snowdrops bringing admirers from miles around. Not so sure about the admirers, but rather fancy the snowdrops.


Anyway, to take this photo you'd be standing with your back to the trampoline, looking west up the hill: a space of about 50ft wide by 60ft long. What you are seeing is not in fact a somewhat daunting and rather shady slope full of weeds and overhung with neglected trees: it is in fact a choice woodland garden, dotted here and there by pretty birches and hazels and underplanted with lovely woodlanders like trilliums, ferns and bluebells. A path zigzags its way artlessly up the slope to the back, with occasional flights of wooden steps for those wishing to take a more direct route. At the top, to the left, is a rustic-style playhouse and den, made by my rather talented garden carpenter hubby and nestling into the corner and providing a perfect retreat for small children and later sulky teenagers, as well as being a nice little focal point when you get to the top of the slope and emerge into its clearing.

See? You've got to have imagination to look at this lot. Plenty of fairly colourful imagination.

Elsewhere in this section: this is a quarry, which has the great advantage of being superbly sheltered, and the rather daunting prospect of very high chalk banks at either side. Where the arrow is - that's just about where the bank stops and the hedge starts. The top of the hedge is another 8ft or so above that. We are thinking scaffolding.

The opposite side of the garden, on the lane side (which is also the shady side). Another bank, this time more gently sloped, and therefore offering some intriguing possibilities for terraces up towards the foot of hedge this side. I'm thinking zigzag paths again, and a rather spectacular collection of ferns, podyphyllums, astilboides.... I have Keith Wiley's gorgeous and inspirational book on gardening in shade on my bookshelf and I shall plunder it shamelessly.

There are actually some quite nice plants here already. Someone way back in the dim and distant past (not, I'm sorry to say, our immediate predecessors here) was a pretty good and knowledgeable gardener: although he/she didn't quite cotton on to the fact that roses don't like chalk and therefore there are a lot of rather sick rose bushes cluttering the place up. Not this one, though, which is some sort of Rosa alba I think and therefore tough enough to scoff in the face of non-ideal soil types.

Clematis are everywhere: this is much to my delight as I have always rather struggled to grow clematis before. This one is in the main garden but I now also have a monster hedge (as if we didn't have enough hedges) of a pink C. montana - either 'Elizabeth' or var. rubens, not sure yet - on the front wall which promises spectacular sights in spring.

And my pride and joy, and if I'm honest, one of the reasons I bought the house; this is of course Ginkgo biloba, a plant I have always wanted to grow as I just adore those leaves. Now instead of struggling to persuade a stringly little sapling to grow into a proper plant, I have all to myself a really big, mature tree, maybe 30ft high, and as hale and hearty as they come. What's more - this picture was taken a few weeks ago and now all those leaves have turned the most vivid shade of butter yellow you can imagine. What a tree.

Popping up again

Now then, now then! That's quite enough of all that unpacking of boxes! Get back in to the garden!

Actually that's a bare-faced lie. My own mother came round to our 'new' (getting less 'new' by the day) house to see us and laughed like a drain at the fact that my veg garden, just one month ago known optimistically as the orchard and a rather overgrown strip of grass bounded by two encroaching hedgerows, is now about 5ft wider (a lot of secateur/lopper/pruning saw action there and I'm still ferrying the waste up to the bonfire spot) and has two sparkly new raised beds, one of which is planted with vegetables. Whereas the house is still half-unpacked, getting back to our usual level of just-bearable scruffiness and we haven't got any furniture yet. You can see where my priorities lie.

I've also got a shiny new blog to write for occasionally and generally fossick around behind the scenes with: what with m'other blog too I've been feeling a little blogged out, to be honest, although I'm having a great deal of fun and can hardly believe my luck at times. Don't tell anyone it's me or they'll realise and I'll have to go back to writing about people killing each other (I used to be a news journalist, in case that last remark seemed more than usually bizarre).

However: there's nothing like the indulgence of your own salary-free blog in which to blather on about stuff nobody in their right mind would pay you to write about. So after my long pause, for which I apologise to anyone who actually cared or indeed noticed, I have returned to bore you all anew. Good luck.

A little sneak peek

We went to visit the new house the other day: and this time, I was armed with a camera. Thought you might like a little sneak peak: here's my new garden.

Small children are an optional extra: we've decided to keep the one with the long hair and the one in the blue jacket but the one with the blonde hair is going.

(I should hasten to add that Long Hair is my eldest, Blue Jacket is my youngest, and Blonde Hair belongs to the current owners, and is rather sweet. The dog, unfortunately, also belongs to them: we plan to install our own very soon).

The garden is in what's left of a former quarry, which explains the steep slope at the back. You can't quite make out that there are also very steep banks at either side, presenting some, ahem, interesting gardening challenges.

Anyway: this bit measures about 50ft x 200ft. But that's not all: this is a garden of many parts.

Part II is a smaller and more well-behaved bit to the other side of the house: it's stepped down the hill in a rather attractive sort of way (this is looking down the slope).

And here's part III. We rather optimistically call it the orchard, mainly on the grounds that it has two apple trees in it (as well as a not-very-well-looking pear tree): it's not quite the sweeping vistas you would expect of your average orchard as it's long and very thin. I measured it at approximately 180ft x 15ft.

One of the reasons for the not-very-well pear tree, I suspect, is the lack of air circulation: that hedge is about 10ft tall. You will hear more about that hedge in due course, I suspect: a lot more. There is a lot of hedge. Oh my Lord, there is a lot of hedge.

There's a bit more too, further up the hill, which we're optimistically referring to as the paddock so doesn't really count as garden: we're going to be using that mainly for my chickens and other animals, and possibly my husband (don't worry, I'll invite him down to the house from time to time). There's also a sort of raised rockery sort of thing in front of the house which rather defies explanation, photography or indeed description.

Soil is chalky but not too dry (owing to the bowl-like dip) and it's all on the side of a south-facing hill, with the long side facing south, if you know what I mean. Any ideas, inspirations or just thoughts on what to do will be just wonderful and pathetically gratefully received.

I will introduce you properly when we're in: we're not entirely free of the potential for jinx just yet as we're still a day or two off exchanging contracts. But there is just one week and four days to go until moving day now: and this is beginning to feel very imminent indeed.