We moved here in March 1969 and were confronted by a ¾ acre plot of overgrown grass, holes where shrubs had been dug up by the previous owner, a procumbent Laburnum which she had tried and failed to uproot, great patches of Bramble, the concrete remains of a cracked ornamental pond and a comprehensive selection of perennial weeds such as Creeping Thistle, Hogweed, “stroil “ as it’s known here in Cornwall, ie Twitch, and, still resisting my strenuous efforts to get on top of it, Ground Elder. Once, bearing in mind the Romans were said to have brought it to Britain as a pot herb, we tried cooking and eating it. It was stringy and tasteless so we abandoned the idea.
At the bottom of the northwest facing slope of the garden, the ‘Orchard’ as we grandly call it, had a couple of sawn -off apple tree stumps and a third one which survived, sprouted again and seems to be one of the Local Tamar Valley varieties known as Pig’s Snout. As the spring advanced, double Snowdrops, then several varieties of Daffs and Narcissi, and then blue and white Spanish Bluebells nosed through a thicket of Blackthorn and Bracken. The bulbs were still in vestigial rows, evidence of some past enterprise of growing for the flower trade.
The house stands almost on the road but to one side was an ornamental garden with flower borders all round, with a stone wall alongside the road and a row of modest-sized Thuyas separating it from the main garden.
My gardening experience was built upon growing veg for the family, first in our garden in N. Somerset where we first lived, and then the more challenging conditions on windswept Bardsey. I must have absorbed such knowledge as I had, from my parents. However, I felt in my bones that I shouldn’t rush things in this next garden, but to first get the feel of the conditions, climate, aspect, soil, before I started anything in the way of structure or design.
The boundaries are a mixture, but loosely based on the local style of ‘Cornish Hedge’ ie a stone-faced earth bank topped with trees and shrubs. The left-hand bank had been recently re-built by our neighbour on that side, to whom this boundary belongs. It is a bulky earth bank for the central half of its length but the top and lowest parts remain traditional stone-faced banks with an assortment of trees and shrubs put in at different times.
The Bottom Hedge, in spring '95. Tony lays it at intervals. It is largely hazel growing on top of a low stoned-faced bank. This too belongs to the neighbour.
The right-hand hedge which is our shelter from the north winds, is a low bank on our side but is a 3 or 4 foot retaining wall on our neighbours’ side so we are higher than them. This hedge has a variety of species, Sycamore, Ash, Elm, Beech, Hawthorn, Guelder Rose, some of which grow to full height, and some Tony cuts and lays at intervals. Some grow up to a considerable height which periodically we cut down for firewood. We consult with our neighbours to agree on what’s done as this hedge overshadows them to an extent, but at the same time gives them shelter and privacy.
Taking down a Sycamore piecemeal.Winter'96
The principal tree on this side is a big multi-stemmed Wych Elm which sadly has succumbed over the last two years to Dutch Elm Disease. We took down one trunk which was leaning over the Knights’ next door but at present are leaving the two remaining trunks which lean our way, as this tree is such an important staging and lookout post for so many of our local birds. We are watching the situation carefully.
Down the other side of the orchard is another elm which also gets the disease from time to time and dies but the remaining suckering growth enables it to start again. Now we are beginning to feel the effects of Ash Die Back, and we have lost a couple of our hedgerow Ashes. One of which was a big tree in which our son built a tree house when he was young. The local Jackdaws used the platform as a lookout post for years before it was eventually dismantled.
Early Days
Confronted with a wilderness of brambles and coarse weeds, for the first year I just began at the top end and dug out a couple of plots for vegetables. Someone in the village gave me some strawberry plants, so they went in. Then I dug out a patch of ground for potatoes but not much else.
Developing the lay-out.
The next year saw some progress, and I laid out what became the enduring basic design, which, although modified particularly in the last ten years of my declining vigour, is still the same.
Dealing with the main body of the garden, it divided naturally into three parts; 1/ the top, biggest area, 2/ a smaller narrow cross-section separated from the main part by great granite boulders. These are the remaining grounders of an old field wall which we inaccurately call the Ha Ha , and the strip behind became known as The Cricket Pitch. 3/ The orchard square lies beyond.
So, I began with the main body, and designated the upper 2/3 of it as ‘ornamental’. I laid out ropes to mark the edges of two wide borders, each running down the sides of the area, with generous sinuous curves to leave a lawn running down the centre. Each side of these borders has a path running the length of the garden, separating the boundaries from the beds. These paths became paved during the later years.
Having established the main layout with the ropes, I gradually dug the borders and by frequent cutting of the remaining rough vegetation, turned the uncultivated places into 'lawn'.
The rather bleak aspect looking SW from about halfway down, in spring 1971. That great gardening guru, Christo Lloyd used to say "if you want a garden you can't have a view" ie you need to be sheltered from the wind. I took this to heart.
This is the same view taken yesterday (Feb.'22) beside a winter-bedraggled Giant Stipa grass.
The old Briggs & Stratton (the only mower we've ever had that I could start!) eventually packed up ,to be replaced by a couple of lesser characters with various starting idiosyncrasies.
Trees
In 1971 I made my first order of trees and shrubs from the local nursery at Endsleigh Gardens. I chose two ornamental cherries, the Great White Cherry Tai Haku for the side garden and ‘Shirotae’ for the lower lawn. I put in an Amelanchier in the upper part of the lawn and a Weeping Pear and a Mahonia japonica to the side of the left of the main lawn. A Tricuspidaria and a Hammamaelis mollis also went in down the left-hand side. Over the years there have been varying fortunes with this selection:
The Amelanchier has grown into a spreading multi-stemmed tree giving delicate white blossom in spring closely followed by young leaves, amber at first. Then a brief show of rosy autumn colour and very occasionally a summer crop of fruit which the birds pounce on even while they are still green. Birds use it as a staging post to warm up in winter sun before coming down to feed at the feeders, so all in all it earns its place.
The Tricuspidaria never fails to give a lovely show of carmine lantern flowers. The Wych Hazel gives a fragrant mid-winter display of golden-threaded flowers and a lemon yellow show of autumn leaves .
Tricuspidaria 2020.
the Tai Haku grew well and made a handsome show for years, until suddenly dying (possibly because a one-time lodger built a shanty-like store at its foot, no doubt upsetting the roots.) With hindsight, however did we allow this?
Young 'Shirotae' cherry, spring 1977 before it developed its strongly horizontal form.
Shirotae' cherry in 1986 It has now grown to show its characteristic horizontal shape.
One of the cherries, put in at the bottom of the main lawn, ‘Shirotae’ grew in its quirky horizontal way, giving a double pleasure of a huge show of semi-double flowers in spring and a feast of autumn leaf colour of pure lemon yellow or yellow suffused with rosy pink, according to the night temperatures. Suddenly, after fifty years, it began to fail and in two years it was moribund. There seemed to be some fungal growth at the base of the trunk - not the dread honey fungus – but I don’t know if this was the killer. We reluctantly took it down last winter as we didn’t want a sad skeletal reminder of our loss. I’m not sure if we will just enjoy the space it has left, or replace it with something else.
. November '03. The Shirotae Cherry is far left with a Sumach dominating the picture .The autumn colour is now provided by the handsome leaves of the shape-shifting Sumach which sets a blaze of colour to the right-hand border for a few brief weeks. The oldest growth we cut out and leave younger suckers till they too outgrow their position.
The Weeping Pear took several years to weep. In fact I tackled the nursery about it, suspecting a mis-labelled plant, but was assured it would weep in time. It did, and made a handsome small tree before having its top-knot screwed off in a winter gale and that was that!
One Christmas Jenny, a friend , and I gave each other three Eucalyptus saplings. my first, a Tasmanian Snow Gum, never took off and I chucked it out after a year or two. The other two have thrived.
One flowers every May and is popular with visiting hive bees.
The other grew to be the tallest tree in the immediate neighbourhood. It had shallow wide spreading roots and you could stand on the ground over them and feel it heave when the wind blew. We became increasingly concerned about the damage it would cause if it blew down. This picture was taken in 2014 and a couple of years later we had it taken down. By then it had produced a slender side branch from close to the base of the main trunk so we left that and it now is a substantial tree in its own right. I can see history having to repeat itself!
By 2016, and before the main tree was felled, the new young 'offset' was this big.
The end of the big Gum. It had the last laugh as it's timber made poor firewood!
In the next couple of years we added a conservatory to the back, west-facing house wall and a lean-to greenhouse on the blank south-facing house wall. Both considerably increased the range of plants I could grow. But until about the early '80s I was using the conservatory as a pottery workshop. The orientation means that we get no sun in here till well into April and have lost it by the end of September. So it gets increasingly chilly and unuseable for a good six months.
Last summer we installed a small wood-burner. What a difference it's made. We sat in there till sunset in the summer and have used it all winter with the stove alight every evening, so we can enjoy looking at the winter garden as it gets dark, and watch the birds feeding by day. What a difference! Why didn't we think of it fifty years ago??
1971, the Conservatory.
1974, building the greenhouse.
The house is built right on the lane. This young pink Kanzan ornamental cherry had been planted by the previous owner just inside the side garden.
The side garden was square with flower borders all round and a row of Thuyas separating it from the main garden beyond.
The Thuyas grew enormously over the years. Their procumbent lower branches gave room under them for wood stores, and play places for the kids. They eventually outgrew their space and we took them down one by one and made mixed flower and shrub beds in the resulting space.
As the pink cherry grew over the years it took so much light from the greenhouse that we decided to take the tree down. The tomatoes in the greenhouse responded and we got better yields again in the following years.
The kids quickly appropriated some of the greenhouse for their cactus collections.
Kids' cacti later ejected from the greenhouse!
The pink cherry is now gone but meanwhile parking pressures in the lane became worse and we decided to take down our road wall alongside the side garden, and turn the side garden into a parking space.
(the flowering climber growing over the wall is a vanilla-scented pink Clematis montana.. Luckily a good deal of it remains nearer the house after the wall was taken down.)
The parking place with room, at a tight squeeze, for 4 smallish cars. The picture shows it immediately after the lousy job of weeding it every year! The gravel surface acts as a wonderful growing medium for every weed under the sun and the arduous labour to keep it clean is the price we pay for not using weed-killer (and for our original short-sightedness in not laying a protective membrane under the gravel.)
We have planted a beech hedge along this side of the car parking space now, and keep it clipped to about five feet.
Vegetables.
Apart from my love of hardy herbaceous perennials, I take great pleasure in growing vegetables and to produce a good crop is very pleasing. We aim to be as self-sufficient as possible, with the exception of potatoes which we haven't room for except for a few rows of earlies.
In Spring 1971 we had all the bottom part of the main garden, I think down to the HaHa, rotavated. This was a mixed blessing. Not only did a it save many hours of digging but it also chopped up the roots of the pernicious weeds which increased the problem. Bridget, jut a 'teenager', standing guard.
Time off from their labours in 1970.
Tony's workshop is behind them.
There was always room for flowers even in the area designated for veg!
(summer 1974)
Over the years, the vegetable garden although always in this area, changed. We put up a fruit cage on the left-hand side, and gradually developed a set of seven fairly shallow raised beds on the right hand side of the wide central path, with wheelbarrow-width paths between them.
.Because they are narrow enough to reach from one side or the other, they are no-dig, but have generous applications of compost on top each winter. We aim to rotate the crops, growing peas, beans (Broad, Runner, French and Borlotii) leeks, onions, garlic. parsnips carrots and beetroot, And a variety of greens and spinach.
Herbs are tucking into corners and salad stuff mostly grown in the greenhouse with the toms. This sounds fairly comprehensive but as with all growing, some crops do well, others fail from year to year and we have a constant battle with our furry friends: rabbits, squirrels, mice and voles and, until we secured our boundaries (we hope), with marauding Roe Deer.
May 2020, the Raised Beds from the right-hand side path.
Hurst Greenshaft Peas growing in one of the raised beds. Rabbit-protection netting along the sides of the row. This was the year a Roe Deer got in and cleared the whole of this row one night. of course it was taller than a rabbit so it could just lean over and browse. The peas were just about ready to pick!
Sep.2020, Borlotii Beans.
On the other side of the main central path running through the veg.area is the (now very decrepit) fruit cage where we grow raspberries, strawberries and greens, to protect them from birds.
And there are two high raised beds, known fondly as Arthur's Grave 1 and 2. This is because a gardening friend in North Wales grows his fantastic veg. in these seriously high beds to save his back and I thought it was a splendid idea. At present I'm growing my onions from seed and sets in them.
The garden slopes downhill away from the house with a west-northwest aspect and we are about 600 ft. above sea level. The soil is acid and free-draining with a hard shillety subsoil. Having previously lived on Bardsey, an offshore island with a maritime climate where the salt winds were the enemy, I kidded myself that Cornwall would be much more benign. Not so here in East Cornwall! Following a Bardsey average rainfall of about 33" a year, we get more like 60" here. These days although we don't get appreciably more as an annual average, it does seem to be falling in much heavier downpours.
Not the prettiest corner of the garden, where we have a set of eight compounds each in pairs so the Bin 1A is filled, covered, and in about six months' time is turned into the adjacent Bin 1B. This applies to each of the four pairs. We find that if we turn in six months, we have a pretty workable compost. Any part-rotted bits just get chucked back onto the current bin being filled.
We compost anything organic unless too woody. The natural regime of gardening in a sizeable plot means that there seems to be a reasonable mix of materials so we don't follow any prescribed method. There does seem to be a lot of hocus-pocus about composting 'secrets'. It seems commonsense for example, not to dump ALL the lawn mowings on in a great wodge at once, but to leaven them with a bucket or two of weeds.
We have a couple of separate bins for autumn leaves to produce leaf mould for 'specially deserving cases'. We allow most of our leaves for the worms to pull down but we are given plenty of bags of leaves swept up by a kind neighbour for whom dead leaves are anathema. It's an ill wind!
Flower Borders.
While all the construction and vegetable-growing was happening, I continued to shape the two big beds running down each side of the top, main part of the garden.
Right-hand border in June '73.
Looking up the garden from the bottom of the left-hand border, summer '77.
Looking down the garden May '85. The silvery-foliaged Weeping Pear in full fig before it's top-knot was blown off in a winter gale. The pond will be discussed in due course.
The 'Shed Bed' in 1999. The young leylandii planted in the middle of this bed by our predecessor rapidly outgrew its welcome and was the first of the inherited conifers to be taken down. Tony's workshop window can just be seen beyond the mass of self-sown Dame's Violet rampaging in its varied colour forms from white to violet.
Middle right, the Sumach bed, summer 2020
The pictures above, I hope, give some idea of the garden in flower through the years. As with all gardens, almost all the plants have a story, a memory, an association. They have come from many places and from many people; some have been lost, more are always being added.
And a garden is for fun too!
Sandpit play summer 2001 Lucie and Robbie with Kim.
Trees are for climbing too. Tony (Taid) and Robbie up the Shirotae cherry. Summer 2002.
Angus slung a rope into a high branch of the big Gum to make a swing. Robbie, summer 2003.
High jinks by the top pond. Lucie and Jacek, summer 2004.
This space is for the imagined sound effect of a rugby ball whistling past your ear as Brennie kicks for touch. Summer 2021. A biggish garden and a relaxed attitude helps.
The Cricket Pitch
In case you are confused by any reference, this area between the HaHa and the Orchard is of the dimensions of a cricket wicket, and was so named as it was another play area. It was when we came here, a big ,continuous bramble patch. Using a hook followed by the Trusty Briggs & Stratton mower, I cleared this area and repeated mowings turned it into grass of a sort.
Ponds.
They come and go.
During the early years, we constructed various ponds. The first was started at the lower end of the main lawn because we inherited a partly-built septic tank begun then abandoned by the previous owner, a serial bodging builder. He had tipped the spoil in a sinuous bank, so, when Tony completed that job, he continued the bank to make a low surround to what became known as The Bottom Pond. We later added an island, a big tussock of peat which we carted off Twelve Men’s Moor. We’re now rather mortified by the pillage!
Bridget supervising the construction of the Bottom Pond at the lower left of what will be the main lawn April '71
King Cups, Bottom Pond 1985
Spring '86. By now, to support our varied flock of poultry (their story comes later) we had made a cement-lined pond in the orchard at the bottom of the garden.
Later, but to continue the pond story briefly, Angie aged about 9 at the time, decided it would be a good idea to dig a swimming pool in the side of the Cricket Pitch. I was equally unwise and we set-to but with rapidly diminishing eagerness as we found we had quickly reached an obstinately solid layer of red shillet. This is the local name for the metamorphosed carboniferous slate which the granite of Kit Hill had pushed up into. Our labours ceased when we’d dug a hole that would have scarcely held a coffin, and we changed tack.
The next effort, a hole some 12 x 12 feet and about 2 foot deep in its lower part, was accomplished to Tony’s amazement, between the time he went to sea one Sunday morning and his return the following Friday night. This ‘Top Pond,’ was dug in soft top soil, taking advantage of the sloping lawn, in the place where the once-ornamental pond of the Howards before us had left their wreckage. In no time we had produced the basic excavation, wanting now only Tony’s beef to roll big granite boulders into place to make a retaining bank along the lower side, and to put in a big sheet of black plastic for the liner.
Lining in, and boulders to support the lower side of the new pond, about three ffot deep at this lower side.
Top Pond, summer '83
and two years later.
Iris kaempheri (I think it's called ensalata now.)
The latest pond to be made was a small one on the back paved terrace area. We just took up a couple of big slates (originally from the kitchen floor) dug a hole about 12" deep, lined it and connected it to the downpipe taking water from the whole of the back roof of the house. The overflow runs through a buried pipe to the top pond and the overflow from this, in times of heavy and continuous rain, runs through another buried pipe to the Bottom Pond.
Anyway, this Terrace Pond was lined and became home for some years to three goldfish given to me by grandson Robbie when he was little. Over the years they grew then disappeared (Heron no doubt)
This is more than enough of the on-going story of the garden. More will follow in a while, in part 2.
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