Professional Gardeners’ Guild Blog

Being patient. How the garden started to take shape.

I’ve not always been the most patient of men, but it worked in our last tied cottage and I’m pretty committed to stuff that works. I moved to 108 in 1999 to start work at Helmingham Hall Gardens.

My Jane joined me after our marriage in May of 2000, kind of a millennium project that one! Homemaking meant we’d never have an instant garden, neither by time nor money. So, with the few plants of any value already earmarked I set about creating a garden over a five year period. It was during this time frame that my childhood passion for wildlife was rekindled by the remarkable diversity of nature at work and my efforts to make a photographic record there began.

Anyway, as the photos show, patience worked for us. We had a lovely garden that we enjoyed very much, and because we’d taken our time we’d acquired materials and plants for free from friends, family and free-cycle.

2008 saw our move to 111, a bigger property but a smaller garden, a nearly three year old and a glint in our eyes. A year later we’d made some decisions, it was time to create our new garden, between nappy changes that is!

As I mentioned last month we had a road one side of us, were penned in by a twelve foot privet hedge on the other side and divided from what used to be a vegetable plot by a six foot fence. The previous resident had also left a six by eight glass house (see last months images) which now sat where a toddler wanted to run!

We chatted to Glen the farmer and he was happy for us to reclaim a portion of the veg plot, we knocked an archway through the fence and repositioned the glasshouse, adding our old one from 108. We noticed the birdlife in Glen’s orchard behind our privet and thought we’d have a better view of it if the hedge was lower. A weekend later I‘d reduced it to three feet, the removed nine becoming smouldering ash where I intended to extend the driveway!

I had always planned to plant a few small trees to encourage my feathered friends over the hedge but the old boundary hedge that ran up the middle of the garden restricted the space to do so. The only thing alive in this, or so it seemed, was the ivy. Ivy is a great source of autumn nectar for a wide variety of invertebrates, especially hoverflies, but there was plenty of it in the roadside hawthorn so I decided that the old tangle had to go.

It was during this operation, made easy by the old rotten elm stumps, that I discovered an immovable root, also elm, that wasn’t going anywhere. This is now my much loved multi-stemmed elm tree that the birds enjoy. It sits in it’s own border surrounded by lawn surrounded by a sweeping flower bed, but more about the choice of plants (over five years) next time.

When Tony asked me to contribute to the website I wondered how I might do so without using material I might otherwise be using in the Wildlife Diary. The answer was quite simple, don’t use the same material! The website slot needed to be a little different so I’ve decided to base it a little closer to home, well, at home actually!

The Bug Man and some rare finds

I didn’t want to call it the Wildlife Diary either, it was going to be different after all. Inspiration came at a prize giving at Woodbridge library, my children had completed the story lab challenge over the summer and were getting some medals. I bumped into a fellow gardener, Mr Nickson from Otley Hall, who introduced me to yet another gardener, Simon was a PGG member and on discovering my name and workplace exclaimed, ‘You’re the Bug Man’. The rest is history.

Working on a private estate, as many of us do, I have a tied cottage. The garden was small, unkempt and open to a busy road along it’s length. It had once been smaller and the old boundary still existed in the form of a rundown hedge, which was basically rotten elm branches held together with ivy. A new privet hedge had been planted to divide the garden from the neighbouring farm and a six foot fence had been erected to enclose the back of the garden where it once extended out into a field that the previous resident had used for vegetables.

Garden summer 2008

I used to work with Mr Kemp, who had lived at the cottage. He’d become ill in 2005 and passed within the year having endured cancer for seven years. In 2007 his wife, unable to look after the garden, had already given up the veg plot to the farmer and decided to find a smaller place off the estate. She knew we needed a bigger place than we had, so she let us know she was moving and we asked my employers if we could take up residence, in March 2008 we did.

Back of garden 2008

We set to work making the garden safe for our nearly three year old, installing a gate set back from the road and linked to the roadside hedge with a four foot tall picket fence. It was then just a case of mowing the grass and waiting to see what emerged from the grassy borders that was worth keeping. Having a wife and small child, a second on the way and a love for gardening and nature, I had a few criteria for my new garden.

• It had to be attractive to wildlife.
• It had to be fun for small children.
• There had to be plenty of flowers for the better half.
• It had to be productive.

And it had to be all this with the minimal work, well, you know how it is after working all week in someone else’s green space!

Back of garden 2012

Over the coming months I’ll be talking about how the garden took shape, what creatures we found, what plants grow here and why we chose them, how we involve our two boys, six and three and what I plan to do to find out more about our wild visitors. As the story unfolds I hope to find ways of encouraging more wildlife and inspire my family with garden fun.

I’d like this journey to be interactive and would welcome comments, dare I say questions too? Please contact me by e-mail at chrisandjanereeve@btinternet.com see you next month!