Non-Gardener builds an Observatory, Garden Railway and even Dabbles with Plants!

It has been said in the past, that I have green fingers - however it's usually olive drab paint ( more of that shortly ). For those who missed my introduction, I've had little interest in gardening, spending twenty one years in a new build house with a small plastic lawn and gravel garden. Plants grow on their own; I don't need to interfere!

In the middle of Covid, thoughts of a new kitchen rapidly evolved into looking for a new house. Due to our insane list of requirements from the new property, it was going to be a challenge finding something suitable and yet it appeared within a couple of weeks of starting to look.

We'll get to the new house and garden shortly, but first, here's the first three reasons that made finding a property difficult. I needed garage space. The two Jeeps are seen in my old front garden VE Day +75 in the middle of Covid.


My 1944 Dodge Weapon Carrier at Tranwell.


OK, so a property with a big garage shouldn't be too difficult, but I also needed some hard-standing space for my R/C aircraft trailer which this lives in.


Add to that some office space, workshop space, a garden with a good southern view and a dark sky for an astronomical observatory and it got quite challenging.

Within a couple of weeks, we found a bungalow that had only been listed four days. Originally a two bedroom, it had grown over the years giving us guest rooms and a big room for my workshop. The garden was big enough for an observatory and with a bit of pruning, would give me that great southern view I wanted. If anything, the garden was a bit too big, with the whole plot being about half an acre and it was a bit more expensive than we had been looking at. However, it had everything we needed, so went for it.

We moved in late February 2021, while Covid restrictions were still in place. Here's a view down the garden from the patio. Our boundary is just beyond the play house and trampoline at the bottom of the garden, with the neighbour's bungalow just beyond that. In the next post, I'll show you around. Grab a coffee and put your feet up, because this is going to be a long ride.

 

The previous owner hadn't had the time to do much more than mow the lawn and around 350 feet of Laurel hedge was getting out of control. Laurel was the first plant I'd learn in the new garden and it has dominated maintenance! I found the For Sale pictures still online from the previous sale four years earlier and the Laurel was less than half the height and half the width. I could see that was going to get out of control quickly if I didn't keep on top of it.



In front of the patio is a slated area, which had lots of woody Lavender. To the right, there was an earth border which had some green things, but was rather bare. Of course, being February, little was growing - except the bamboo by the back door! That was going to have to go too.

Down the garden each side, was more Laurel hedges with two small wooded areas at the bottom.

 

The woodland on the left was going to be chopped. This was my southern view and the location for my trailer hardstanding, observatory, some additional lawn area and a garden railway ( fullsize! ). All of these trees also shaded the bottom of the garden, so it was always dark and wet, getting very little sunlight except for a short time in the evening.



We'd be keeping the woodland on the right side of the garden, but the two tall Conifers would be going. Soon after we got there, as Spring sprung and the grass started growing, I put a Fitbit in my pocket when I mowed the lawn. It turned out to be a two mile walk to cut the grass! Hmm, this gardening lark is going to be harder work than I thought.



Well, that's all for the moment, until I sort the next batch of pictures.

 

@ArmyAirForce .

I love seeing such transformations so thank you for sharing. Not many have to plan an observatory- sounds fantastic!

 

Interesting read looks like you've got a lot on your plate at the moment and a nice big garden whether you like it or not . Does the plane fly ? looks quite big to get of the ground.

 

Yes it did. It doesn't now for various reasons, but it was airworthy between 1995 and 2004, which is when it last flew.

 

Our previous home was a 3 bed semi detached in the middle of a housing estate. Surrounded by houses, we couldn't see the horizon. Our new home was on the edge of the village, looking out over a shallow valley to the West and North West. As a result, we began to see great sun sets.



During the Winter, the Sun sets pretty much straight down the bottom of the garden behind the neighbour's house and trees. As we moved into Spring and Summer, it moved slowly to the right into a clear horizon about 16 miles away. These two pictures were from early March 2021.

 

When we bought the house, our old home in Washington was in an unconnected house chain and so for some time, we owned both houses. This worked out quite well, as my daughter was in her final year of primary school, so my wife stayed in Washington during the week, so my daughter could stay in her school, then they'd both come to the new house at the weekend.

Because we had both houses and a large trailer, we decided to move house ourselves. Some stuff would remain in Washington until the school year finished, but lots of stuff could move. So while there was a ton of stuff to do in the garden, the first few weeks were taken up with shuttling stuff from one house to the other.

One of the first jobs was to move the contents of my workshop and rebuild it. I needed somewhere to do all the DIY needed in the new house and we needed the old workshop space cleaned up for viewings for that house sale.



It was all moved and rebuilt by the 23rd of March, 'though the sink wasn't plumbed in until early May. So for the first month in the new house, the garden wasn't touched. That was about to change.

 

29th March 2021

On the 29th, we finally started a little pruning in the garden. We had quite a bit of preparation to do before our building work could start. I wanted to park my trailer next to the garage, a space that was occupied by the garden shed and a greenhouse.

The plan was to extend the concrete a few feet to the right and not having a great interest in plants, we'd get rid of the greenhouse. The shed could then move forwards and to the right, leaving space for my trailer by the garage and my wife's Girl Guides trailer behind the shed. In order to do that, a large eight tree conifer hedge had to go.



Along side the conifer hedge was the woodland, all of which was going to be cleared. There were around thirteen trees of various sizes, the largest being about thirty feet tall and around twenty five feet wide. I did some clearing myself, but knew we'd need some professionals in for the larger trees and to chip all the waste.

By the end of the 29th, we had made progress clearing the smaller trees and low branches on the large tree. This then gave us some information to contact a tree felling company with what was needed.

 

Great stuff. Please continue the story as and when.

 

2nd April 2021

It was Easter Weekend when the guys came to cut down the trees. We apologised to the neighbours for the noise, but they said the trees, particularly the largest, should have got the chop years ago. They should know, they used to live there.

All the smaller trees were cut and chipped first, leaving the large one until last. Counting the tree rings after the chop, it was 24 years old.



On the other side of the garden, we decided to take the two large conifers down, as they were starting to dominate the area and the right one spreading over the lawn. This also allowed more evening light into this part of the garden.

 

I do like to see dark, blobby, light grabbing conifers being removed but they can also be improved.

Adrian Bloom has demonstrated in his Foggy Bottom garden that carefully selecting forms and colours of conifer can be very attractive but he also prunes and shapes them to provide vistas. He uses crown lifting, cloud pruning and selective removal of branches to lighten their shape and form.

We inherited a whole row of "dwarf" conifers on a slope ere when we moved in nearly 9 years ago and one great big blob down the end of our plot. I was delighted when a 13 month drought led to the overgrown dwarves all dying in our second winter here and we could get rid easily. It took a while, but OH finally got around to finishing the crown lifting on th ebig blob so that, one day, I can set a table and chairs under it for sitting out in the shade.

 

3rd April 2021

We needed the stumps of the conifer hedge removed in order to extend the concrete. A little digging revealed a low wall of really hard bricks around the roots. The tree guys said they needed to come out or they could damage the stump grinding tool. So after they finished for the day on the 2nd, I started hammering!



The site my house is on was once a Victorian school. The school buildings lasted into the 1960s and during the war, there were two air raid shelters built; one at the location of each woodland. The pictures below show an identical shelter on an airfield. The bricks I was hammering out were part of a blast wall in front of the entrance.





It took ages with a hammer and bolster chisel, but the following day, the guys could get to work. Also, as can be seen here, the greenhouse went a couple of days before. It was taken by a guy in Gateshead and will get more use than we could have got from it. The garden plan didn't accommodate space for a greenhouse.

 

The following day, which I think was Easter Monday, we got rid of a lot of the really woody Lavender. It hadn't been well kept and was very dead looking for most of the plant, except the top. My wife isn't a fan of the smell, so most of it was removed.



Everything got dumped on the recently cleared woodland area, ready for disposal. With the woodland gone, it revealed how patchy the Hawthorn hedge was, with quite a lot of gaps and thin areas. With all the trees, the garden side never saw any sun light, so had little growth. Our neighbour said to tidy it up and give it time, as it would recover.

We had saved some of the chopped tree branches, and fed these into the Hawthorn to fill the larger gaps, as this boundary is onto a public park. Those branches gave the Hawthorn something to grow around, so as it grew new shoots, we were able to weave them into the chopped branches, to fill in the open spaces with living hedge.

 

11th April 2021

The day started well, scarifying the lawn. We just had a little electric scarifier, which was fine for our small Washington front lawn, but got a tad warm on our new huge lawn. It got there in the end, allowing some cool down time and we pulled a ton of moss out of the grass. The worst area was along the Laurel hedge, where the lawn was almost constantly in the shade. It was all bagged up, ready for disposal.



In contrast to the Spring sunshine in the morning, it clouded over and then this happened. OK, we'll leave the rest of the lawn for another day! Work then moved indoors, moving some pipework in the utility and extending a water supply to the workshop.