Labours of love. Restoring a garden

I have spent a lot of time 'beginning to' restore a garden area to the side of our house.

It is about forty meters square and lies to our northeast elevation. When we arrived in 2023, this garden was extremely overgrown, the grass area swamped with moss, the result of a gutter soakaway, giant unruly shrubs and a number of straggly old apple trees; the remnants of what we now know was an old orchard. Along the northwestern boundary, there lies what is left of a very tall retaining stone wall, dangerously in need of structural stabilisation, and to the opposite side, a simple post and wire fence dividing the garden from the front paddock. A steep bank of cherry trees provides some shelter from the nagging easterly winds.

As soon as I saw the garden for the first time, on that freezing January day, when the rain had come in horizontal waves on gale force winds and the lady from the estate showing us around, had hands as blue as her woollen scarf, I had wanted to turn it into a formal garden. A formal garden with high Yew hedges, topiary bushes, somekind of water feature, classical statuary, stone urns and a rambling herbaceous border of summer perennials.

The original structure of the garden lent itself to this kind of treatment. The square-ish block of what could be a lawn, once the shrubs and trees were cleared, still had its old stone edgings and the pebbled paths that bordered its four sides, were still discernible under their blanket of autumn leaf-mold. A border, tangled with tree roots and fallen stone (later to reveal a stubborn matt of Ground Elder) lay under the crumbling stone wall along with a giant rhubarb plant, which was probably a hundred years old.

So, we set to work. First with the trusty JCB to dig up and transplant the huge rhododendron swallowing up half the lawn. The Holly bush shared a similar fate. Both are now repositioned at the end of the garden, helping to provide shelter from the northeast. The craters that were left were filled in, and eventually re-seeded. The fruit trees, all but two, we concluded were passed their best and ended up as firewood. I dug up a large clump of yellow flag iris (that some would consider a weed), relaying the rhizomes in front of a new Yew hedge along the cherry tree and paddock boundary. We then purchased sixteen Box bushes, both spherical and conical in shape and positioned them in a symmetrical design dissecting the new lawn into four, parterre style.  

The following spring and summer, if you remember, the summer it rained without stopping, was my mammoth labour of love. I dug the ground elder out of the twenty-meter border under the stone wall with a hand spade, wheelbarrowing the subsequent debris down to the paddock. Back and forth, back and forth, until my limbs ached. I lifted the wall-rubble boulders to the back, for later repairs. Who needs to go to the gym? I transplanted a patch of naturalised King Solomon’s Seal into an orderly block and painstakingly scraped out the ancient weed-roots from in between the stone path edgings, sometimes using a kitchen knife.

Meanwhile, I sowed literally hundreds of seeds into trays, yoghurt pots and anything else suitable I could find. This was the only affordable option for planting such a large area from scratch. The back kitchen (almost indistinguishably warmer than outside during April) becoming a potting shed cum greenhouse. Antony purchased horticultural wire shelving from an auction, to help me in my quest to raise enough perennials to plant out a convincing, twenty-meter by four-meter herbaceous border, later that summer.

Some plants didn’t make it through their first winter. That is one thing I have learned about living here; plants need to be as hardy as they come. But, some did. And another year on, the border is looking almost something like, despite the relentless and damaging east wind we have had through the spring. The Valarian ended up being a mistake, so had to go. The second attempt at Cardoons, a Victorian favourite, will definitely have to be protected from frost in the winter. The roses are all doing well and the Echinops globe thistles and Eryngiums are looking extremely healthy, although not flowering yet. The stars of the show so far (first week of June) are the papery white oriental poppies bought from Maureen up the dale, the black-throated white perennial foxglove bought as a job lot of ten, at auction, and a giant white allium, ‘Mount Everest’ purchased from Lidl!  

My planting scheme has been designed to mix blue and mauve thistle-style plants representing our new home Scotland, with soft pastel and white roses, representing our old home in Yorkshire. Or perhaps more aptly, the planting of two Yorkshire folk in Scotland!

Gardens evolve. They take time, all our time, they require constant attention and effort. But in return they are our greatest friend, giving generously the gift of pleasure and delight, keeping our mind positive and constructive and our bodies exercised.

My formal garden here at Teindside, inspired by the enchanting stories I read as a child, will develop over time. Maybe one day, it will be ready to open to the public with tea and homemade scones on the lawn!