Proper intro, after asking questions already!

Hi all. Just thought I'd put a quick intro on here, after asking questions already.

Our last house was a start-from-scratch exercise inside and out. Luckily it was a small garden (about 6mx10m) so it was about the right size for us to learn on. It was heavy compacted clay and nothing had been done on the garden since the house was built in the 70s. So I dug every inch of that soil, double-dug all the borders, reseeded the lawn, and generally got everything right. Almost all the plants (scrubby, half-dead things) came out, except for a weigela, ribes and honeysuckle which were OK. By the end we had a garden with a lovely set of border shrubs (and a *really* successful wisteria covering most of the back wall), and it only needed pruning a couple of times a year and mowing, so nice and low maintenance.

Anyway, we sold that and bought a house in the north of Cambridge last year. Again, it's a start-from-scratch job, except the house is nicer and there's a lot more garden - 22mx9m. When we got the place, it was mostly covered by outbuildings and a front-to-back concrete driveway, because the previous people had been plumbers and ran their business out of there. So we got a couple of guys to demolish all that and take it away - 50 tons of rubble in all! We've now essentially got a backyard wasteland, while we've been deciding what to do.

The quarter of the garden nearest the house is going to be a patio with a formal pond. The garden slopes down slightly to the house, so we're flattening it off into two levels, with the patio at the lower level and the rest of the garden higher up, and a drystone retaining wall dividing the two.

The formal pond is the subject of a separate thread, so I won't go there! There'll also be a water-garden section to the right on the higher level, with water flowing down into the formal pond, and some kind of screening between it and the rest of the garden.

Then there's the lawn, which my wife insists has to be in the shape of a 4-leaf clover. That fits in reasonably well, and also fixes where the shrub/flower borders are going to be (in the gaps between the "leaves").

And finally at the back there'll be an orchardy area with a few fruit trees, and underplantings of woodland plants like bluebells.

That's the plans anyway. First step is to finish building a secure shed next to the house for storing my music gear, after which I'll get digging! The idea this year is to get the hard landscaping done - level the two tiers off, dig the pond and pave the patio. That should be plenty enough to be going on with.

The top tier will be pretty much left to its own devices, apart obviously from shovelling soil around to level it off. Come winter, I'll rotovate the top tier (having a friend who was previously a professional gardener-tree-odd-job-man is useful!) to break up the hard-packed subsoil that previously held the outbuildings, and mix in a load of horse manure to loosen it up and improve the subsoil generally. Then I'll buy in a load of topsoil, seed the whole area with lawn grass, and leave it until next summer to think about what to do next.

Wish me luck! :-)

Cheers,

Graham.

 

Good luck! It sounds like you've got a pretty impressive plan there. If you get bored, pop about 10 miles north and give me a hand with mine ;-)

 

Bored - probably. Going to dig over someone else's place when I can't face doing ours - unlikely. ;-) Good luck with your place too.