Hi from Gatwick Airport

Hello, I am Martin. Nice to be here.

At the end of last year, shortly after I retired, I bought a small detached house near Horley, situated almost on the threshold of runway 26L at London Gatwick Airport (well OK, not quite, but it often seems so with the wind in the 'wrong' direction!). It comes with a garden, which is great; but I am no gardener, so have joined the site here as I clearly am going to need some advice.

I have lived abroad for more than half my working life, in many different countries, and sometimes the house I rented came with a garden, sometimes a very nice one (with a gardener and lemon, mango or banana trees growing there - and with huge snakes occasionally crawling through their branches). The properties I ended up buying rather than renting were in town centres though (Chania, in Crete; and London, near Charing Cross station, where only billionnaires have gardens!) and I just had window boxes.

Well, so much for my little intro. I hope it will do. Thank you in advance to any green-figured 'gurus' who might advise me in the months - and years (hopefully) - to come.

 

Thank you :-)

 

Hi @martinlest. I'm fairly new on this forum too, but we used to have friends who lived not far from you. A friend of my now ex husband, and his [now also ex!] wife lived there, and we visited a few times.
I expect it's a wee bit different from your other gardens, re the exotic planting and snakes, but hopefully you'll enjoy working on it and making it your own. At least you'll have a bit more room than window box too!

 

Welcome @martinlest

 

Hello Martin. I will only share a window box with you for now but hope you will soon send some photos. We love photos. Perhaps you can send a pic of what you have now, Enjoy.

 

Hello, thank you for the welcome.

Yes, I always appreciated having exotic plants (and animals!) in my gardens - how nice it was to be able to go outside and pick fresh curry leaves, or lemons when I was cooking!

But this Surrey garden has its own charms of course and although not large, I want to treat it well. A few weeks ago, I almost bought a few 'toy' snakes from Amazon to put in it, but decided in the end that it would be more silly than amusing . (My son, on visits, would have been horrified - he absolutely hated the snakes in India!).

OK, I will upload a few photographs soon.

 

Grass snakes might not be cobras, but Gatwick has plenty of them…

https://www.gatwickairport.com/on/d...y-reports/Biodiversity_Annual_Review_2022.pdf

 

Sorry, I had to laugh above. We have two Jacarandas, and when they were small (c2001) we needed to stake one and the only tie we had was a piece of hose and I cut one end to look like a snake head. As time went by, the tree grew around the hose and eventually all that was left was Sir Hiss's head poking out. Now it is totally absorbed in the tree and we have a cat ledge in the tree above Sir Hiss's resting place.

 

Actually, I am still 'sensitised' to snakes, even back in Surrey! Happens fairly frequently that I see what turns out to be a bit of rope or a small tree branch laying around and which apparently suggests to my unconcious mind 'Snake!!" - and just for a split second I am on full alert. I have never seen a grass snake in my life though!

 

We used to have an old cat that would go out for a stroll and bring them back, alive, for us to admire and then rehome. Of course, it might have been the same poor old grass snake going round and round. Slow worms too, sometimes.

 

Welcome to Gardeners Corner @martinlest

 

The thing with cats (well, 'a' thing at least!) is that they have a far faster reaction time than snakes, such as cobras, so they almost never get bitten (fortunately for them): they are fast enough to avoid the strikes. You can see some videos of cats v. cobras on YouTube.

Thanks for the welcomes.

 

Welcome to GC martinlest.