Garden focus

Open gardens on Sunday was good although it was grey and windy, the worst the weather has been for weeks. Despite that and competing with Father’s Day, we had more than 80 visitors and raised £800 to be split between the local hospice and the church hall restoration fund. All in all a good village day with great community spirit. Thankfully the focus on the garden will be less intense from here on in!

The garden was our focus when we first moved in more than 10 years ago. We hadn’t planned on buying a Grade II listed property in a conservation area and it was going to take us time to work out what we wanted to do with the house. The garden, however, was massively overgrown with trees, brambles and bushes that hadn’t been tackled for some time. So that’s where we started our project.

We wanted to turn the front from a car park with chippings and pampas grass into a traditional cottage garden complete with picket fence. Our first lesson on the hurdles we were going to face renovating and improving our home was the need for full scale planning permission and listed building consent for the fence. It seemed a bit over the top,  particularly when they asked for a scale drawing which meant a postage stamp size of what looked like a row of tiny match sticks on an A4 piece of paper. It did the trick however, met the requirements and we received the go ahead. It was an interesting lesson on what is needed to make changes – follow the process. It also helped having a picture from the late 1800s showing that a picket fence was in keeping with the period property. We were to use this picture later in our application to renovate the old house.

Once permission was granted we needed to remove a mountain of chippings and dig up the tarmac underneath with the help of a local farmer and a neighbour with a trailer to take it away. We were also keen to plant a horse chestnut, a tree often found in front of blacksmiths perhaps because it provides shade, and restore what was there until the mid-1900s. Although this will take decades to reach full height and really achieve it’s full glory, it’s part of what we see as being guardians and restoring not just the property but also it’s surroundings for future generations. Many of the plants however are much quicker and this year the front garden really came into its own.