Welcome to my Seriously Steep Garden
There is something very special about sitting in the garden in the summer sun, sipping a glass of white wine and watching the plants blow in the wind. Especially if 12 months ago your garden looked like this.
As featured on HTV’s Roots and Shoots
Chapter 1 : Planning
It all began with an ad in the paper for self build scheme. You know the sort of thing build you own home get what you want. No one told us it would take two years and cost lots of money and provide both my husband and me with a few gray hairs.
In November 2000 we moved in to our new home, It is beautiful and a great place to live near to the centre of the lovely market town of Ilminster. However, the planning office insisted that the site was dropped by an extra meter means the back of the garden is level with the eves of the house, just 8 meters away at the narrowest point.
Even before we moved in, in fact while the scaffold was still ringing the house, I decided I could not get my brain around the complexities of the levels and strange shape of the garden.
Luckily help was at hand. Katherine Crouch, the first BBC Gardener of the Year, lives in Ilminster , a tentative e-mail showed she was willing to do as much or as little as we required. We met one spring evening in 2000, picking our way between the scaffold trying to make sense of the outside space. We decided to ask Kath for some designs and in late summer the plans were provided and very much approved.
Chapter 2 : Digging
My Dad who had done all the labouring on the internals of the house, building every thing from the stud walls to a fireplace made out of window lintels, did not feel he could take on the garden, after all he is retired, therefore we asked Kath to obtain quotes for the hard landscaping. The prices however were well beyond what we could afford and what Kath expected, mostly because our garden would require almost as much stone as the house itself. So in the end it was my Dad and his friend Peter who did most of the labouring, digging foundations and moving tons and tons of wet sticky clay soil with lumps of stone distributed through it in such a way as to make digging nearly impossible,
Chapter 3 : Walls
For the stone and brick laying, I took advantage of living on a building site to persuade the brickies working on the other houses on the scheme to put up the walls on an hourly rate, with, once again, my Dad helping them and mixing concrete and ensuring they had all the materials to hand as they built the walls.
From the frosts of February to the oppressive heat of early summer, Dad, Peter and occasionally my husband and me built the garden. At Easter the garden was beginning to take shape. It’s strange to think I was so pleased to look out on scalpings and breeze blocks, while our visitors looked out dismayed. Things were taking shape.
Chapter 4 : Taking Shape
After Easter things progressed a pace, the brickies came most Saturdays and the stone began to clad blocks with a soft gold colour.
Chapter 5 : The Recipe
- 12 pallets of Breeze Blocks
- 7 pallets of stone
- 50 bags of Cement
- 6 tonnes of building sand
- 10 tonnes of scalpings
- 2 tonnes of rendering sand
- 2 tonnes Cotswold chipping
- 6 pallets of paving slabs
- Lots of hard work
- and . . . some plants
- Bake for 5 months
Chapter 6 : The Results
The End – or maybe the beginning
