I’ve been planning to remodel the garden ever since we moved in two and a half years ago.
The garden is very small by most standards and miniscule compared to the size of the gardens that surround us here in our rural Somerset village. Having such a small garden was a bone of contention for me when we were deciding whether to buy the house. I wanted a bigger garden and although I loved the house, there was a small garden-shaped shadow over my excitement when we moved in.
But then our friend Jo, an obsessive gardener, visited and squealed delight at the size of the garden, declaring it perfect. So I looked with different eyes and resolved to make it beautiful.
Clearing the Garden
Fast forward two years and on Easter Sunday, Jo, Jack and I set about clearing some of the existing, tired and overgrown planting to make way for a new gravel garden.
I had resolved to dig out one section of a thickly overgrown hedge to make way for planting underneath. Jo decided there was no room for half measures and set about slashing the entire hedge. Then she moved to the back fence and began ripping out a huge jasmine that I had long lamented over as it produced few flowers and no scent.
On a video call to his mum and watching out the patio doors at Jo’s clearing spree, Jack said she resembled the out-of-control gardening gnome in Wallace & Gromit Vengeance Most Fowl. By the time Jo and I had finished, the garden was a blank canvas except for five deeply embedded root balls which Jack sweated over for almost an hour before finally removing the beasts.
Creating the Gravel Garden
After lunch, we started painting the fencing. The fence we had removed the overgrown hedge from was in fairly good shape but had been pulled forward by the weight of the hedge and had a distinct bow in it. Nevertheless, Jo and I set about painting it in an ice-blue shade while Jack trimmed the bay tree into shape and cleared more roots. The following morning we finished most of the painting and drove Jo to the station. In the afternoon, I finished the painting and then Jack and I set about doing the planting.
We had bought tangerine geums; deep purple salvias; lilac verbenas; and electric blue Sea Holly. To replace the overgrown jasmines, we had a chocolate coloured akebia which we planted against the new, bright blue fence, and we planted red-leaved ornamental grasses in between. With the existing lavender about to flower, and a mass of sweet pea planted to climb the obelisk, we stood back to admire our work.
It was gorgeous.
The following day, our next-door-neighbour straightened the fence, and for the next week and a half, I painstakingly watered and fed everything every evening in the hopes it would bed itself in before we went to Italy.
Normally, I would be delighted by the lack of rain but as a newly obsessed gardener I began to worry what would happen if the hot weather continued while we were away. Our neighbours would be away at the same time so there was no-one to water in our absence.
The Italian Garden Holiday
Our long-awaited Italian Garden Tour arrived, and we set off from a hot and dry Somerset, into a cool and damp Napoli. Over the course of the next eight days, we visited some of the finest gardens in Italy, sighing deeply over the results of years of planning, collecting, planting, pruning and tending to produce living works of art.
Every day I checked the weather back home. Hot, sunny and dry with little prospect of rain. As our return date loomed, we fretted that we would find a shrivelled and dead gravel garden when we got home. Jo had carefully cultivated lots of seedlings in her garden in Exeter and although she had asked a friend to water them, she too fretted that all would be lost.
It was almost midnight by the time we got home so had to wait until morning to open the bedroom curtains. I held my breath, hardly daring to look. Yet, miraculously, smiling in their gravel beds were the orange faces of geums and the vivid purple spikes of salvias, all awash with bees. Everything else had also grown exponentially.
Before I had even had my coffee, the phone pinged with a WhatsApp message from Jo:
How’s the garden?
I replied:
Alive!!!!
All her seedling were also flourishing. We returned with heads filled with ideas of planting and grand schemes, but I look out at our little garden and I sigh. I love it. We still have lots to do, more climbers to plant, bulbs to put in, structural plants to buy… I’ve become obsessed with the garden.
