The New Year

A new year begins and hopefully one to further my horticultural knowledge, experience and success. I’ve not been terrible in the past, I’ve plodded along and learnt a few things, and last year I saw good results in the things I attempted. This year however, I am far more prepared. I have been a keen listener to BBC Radio 4’s Gardeners’ Question Time and am now a subscriber to Gardeners’ World Magazine. I have also made copious notes from a book my father has about allotments including a month by month guide as to what jobs to be doing, and what plants to be sowing, planting out, pruning etc.

 

So in what condition do I start? I won’t go into too much detail about my condition – 6 ft 3 in height, 107 kg at the last weigh-in, 36 years old, getting a bit thin on top and lacking any serious exercise for a few years. No, I mean the condition of my garden. I live in a city in southern England and have a house that was built in the early 1900’s – not even the deeds record exactly when; needless to say it’s over a hundred years old. When certain types come knocking the door offering me a free survey of the exterior of my house to see how it is faring against the elements, I proudly point out that it has stood for over a century, survived the blitz (a bomb fell just up the road) and will survive a few more years of rain, thank you very much for your concern! The house is typical for its era; a mid terrace with a long, thin garden - 24 metres long and a little less than 5 metres wide. When my wife and I bought the house as newlyweds, it had been dormant for a few years, the previous resident having moved out at 98 years of age to live in a care home. Someone had been in to cut back the bushes and mow the lawn so it was not a jungle, but it did have seriously high and dense weeds along the borders. I remember my first job was to tear down the old shed and burn off the wood, and the wood that was stored in it, and the wood that was stored in a corrugated iron shed the shape of an outside toilet building. That fire severely damaged the lawn so I dug and raked and sifted and attempted to flatten the soil and sowed a new one.

 

Way back then, it was my intent to make a garden that children could enjoy without parents having to worry about what they were going to fall on, get pricked by or stung by, so the stinging nettles had to go. 11 years after that pledge I think I finally got rid of them. Now I learn that nettles make an extremely good accelerator for compost bins and rot down to a dark, peaty and fibrous mass. I’ll have to import some! In order to provide land that children could run around in, I decided to devote most of the space to lawn. Looking back that has paid off when considering the allusion of space. My neighbours have gone for a bushy garden with a longer area of patio and when I was watering plants for them last year, I could not believe how much smaller their garden was than mine – it isn’t, it is just that I have a larger open area. The sense of green space, indeed simply space, is very important to me. I couldn’t stand looking out of my back window and seeing my garden fence only 5-10 metres away, and the house behind us therefore 10-20 metres away. With our house, the neighbours in the next street are a good 48 metres from us and separated by our crowning glory, a 12m (over 39ft) tall sycamore tree. I may live a short walk from the High Street, and the front of our house may only be a few steps from the pavement, but come to my back garden and I see green - a good green lawn, a tree at the end, and privet to the right and holly to the left. In the middle of town it is my little oasis and I can imagine myself in the country. This illusion saves what sanity I have left as I hate the city, but have come to accept it. Surprisingly this part of town is very quite and that helps the allusion. If one looks over the fence one can see quite a few mature trees around the place which is comforting.

 

The plan of my back garden is quite simple. There is a small space of concrete, and I mean small! Then the lawn starts. On the left of the lawn, which is the shady side due to the fence, there is a border for a few metres which grows very little. What does thrive there is a holly tree, from which a few years ago I had to lop off the 3 highest boughs (all taller than me when I stood next to them back at ground level) which were all headed straight to the sky, and yet is still 5.5m (18ft) tall. At the foot of the holly grows a bush that my eldest yet little boy calls a bee hive (because he saw a bee on one of the flowers – once) and which reminds me of a rhododendron but isn’t. Further on from the holly is a very small fir tree then a large lilac tree which, again, I cut shorter over 2 seasons. I had noticed that the leaves were few and far between on the higher reaches so I trimmed down half the taller ones 2 springs ago and the rest at the end of last summer. It paid off as the tree is much healthier looking now and still provides good shade. Mind you, the suckers it shoots out are nobody’s business! Lilacs do this when pruned. Between the holly and the lilac is a sandpit. After the lilac, the border ends and there is grass up to the fence until you reach the rockery near the end. The rockery is small and is a curious mixture of heathers, violets, carnations, 2 ornamental grasses and spring bulbs (I had so many I had to put them somewhere or throw them out).

 

On the right hand side of the garden there is a narrow paved path at the edge of the lawn with a narrow border between it and the fence. The first part is a strawberry patch which has had 2 very successful years. It had been fairly dormant but I dug up all the plants, dug in loads of horse manure, trimmed the plants of the yellow leaves and runners, and replanted them. The yield the summer before last was tremendous but we were away on holiday when the glut of strawberries was ripe. Last year it worked out much better, and there were even strawberries ripening in early November! They hadn’t been going all that time, but had ceased and started up again. After the strawberries, there is a gap for the large manhole cover – the main one for our group of houses – over which I have placed a large paving slab propped up on wooden beams, which holds a large pot for my wife’s fuchsia. This is her one part of the garden, and I look after it! Also on the slab, is where I placed 2 shop-bought chilli plants and a pot of basil. Farther on from this is the privet hedge which replaces the fence and a wider border in front with the path running a rather attractive chicane around it. In this part of the border are 2 rose plants and what I think may be a 1-year old apple tree, from a pip that was thrown out after I ate the apple. I have no idea what type it is but it is likely to be a royal gala. This bed will hold the largest area of spring bulbs. As the path turns back towards the fence, the border narrows to about 2-3 feet and there are dotted along it a few shrubs, roses, fuchsias, and at the end, a stretch where I grow herbs, a few spinach and sorrel plants, and where I place the grow bags for my tomatoes. The border goes past the level of the rockery which does not come right across the end of the lawn from the left, the lawn going to the right of it. The border ends with a very large pampas grass that I bought for 50p at a car boot sale and was a thin, less than 1 foot high shoot at the time. I planted it along the border but then had to move it to where the border widens slightly at the end. The border ends past the end of the rockery, and we enter the working area of the garden.

 

There is a space behind the rockery where my eldest boy (who is very nearly 4) keeps his pile of dirt for digging and poking sticks into, then the shed. This was a father-and-son project when we first moved in. My wife would be sat upstairs studying for her first round of accountancy finals, so I would stay out of her way sorting out the garden and building the shed with my Dad. The shed is over to the left, so the right entails a wood pile for a fire I don’t have (I like camp fires but don’t have them enough to warrant the amount of wood that I have acquired), a small pile of rotting horse manure, and my 2 compost bins – the dalek-like ones bought from the council, thankfully hidden behind that pampas grass – another reason for replacing it there. Immediately to the right of the shed is a panel of wood (to hide the pile of wood), in front of which is our anniversary present from last year from my parents – a willow tree, currently standing at about 3 feet and is the type that will not grow much larger. At the end of this working area is another lilac tree and the sycamore tree, which leaves a small space behind the shed where I store my black plastic bags of leaves being left to break down to make a soil improver. That space is hard to get to if I haven’t pruned the lilac for a while, and I’m convinced will be a great den for my eldest before too long.