Restoring the garden
You may have visions of me floating around a perfect garden, picking whatever takes my fancy (it is like that occasionally), but largely I’m desperately running around madly trying to keep it just the right side of abandoned.
a bit about the garden
I tend the garden on my own - single point of failure - so when I’m busy elsewhere the garden inevitably gets neglected.
I’m creating my own little sustainable haven here, often doing things contrary to garden-lore but things that work for me (I was once told that the bark chipping paths will supposedly attract slugs, but I’m not growing for perfection so knock yourselves out little slimy ones).
I’m consciously trying to reincorporate everything back into the garden. Rather than running to the tip with bags of prunings and weedings I’m creating dead hedges from discarded branches and have a very half hearted compost heap (which really needs addressing).
It also helps massively that I can throw unwanted weeds like brambles and creeping buttercup (of which I have thousands) into the field for the cows to munch on. I only throw things that would come from the field naturally, or plants that I know they enjoy (when I summer pruned my apples tree they were particularly happy cows).
I haven’t used any fertilisers, weedkillers or pesticides for years and I try to disturb the soil as little as possible.
We are surrounded by sycamore trees so we have plenty of leaves. Now I know that the received wisdom about leaves is to gather them up, let them rot down for a year then liberally apply to the garden. I have tried doing that but it is just too labour intensive so it fails, instead I mimic nature and just add the fallen leaves directly, especially around trees. I mean it’s only what happens naturally and surely it’s better than not doing it at all?
The wildlife takes priority, so much so that I have had to pause several ambitious *creations* because of some nesting critter or other.
Paused work on the conifers because of Tawny owl activity
I was really excited about creating a dramatic arch feature and started work on it a couple of years ago, but as I was waiting for a nesting season to pass, a Tawny owl started either roosting or nesting in the canopy that I need to remove, so I’m still working out how to take that forward.
The half hacked conifers now just look really weird!
We’re in the Pennines, so have high rainfall & do moss and walls very well :)
We are located in West Yorkshire, are surrounded by sycamore trees and cling to the side of a hillside, overlooking fields, moorland and the Ryburn Valley. It was very tidy and manicured when we moved here in 2007 and I’ve been making it more me ever since.
I inherited a formal lawn flanked by box balls
I dug up the lawn and made it more painterly
Follow my journey
as I try to wrestle the garden back
As I said above, I’ve slightly lost control of it, it’s always the first thing to get left when I am busy elsewhere. I’m documenting my progress here on the website as well as on my Instagram and TikTok - I’d love you to follow along. (It may all go a bit pear-shaped when I have other projects on but I’ll share that fall out too!)
