Bluebell Cottage - the first five years - Part Two

(cont. from Part One... Scroll down if you want to skip the waffle and go straight to the before and after pictures)

That first year was like living in a permanent hurricane. Every day something new emerged in the garden or nursery and every morning brought another quest to identify a mystery plant before a customer asked what it was. We rushed around like mad things weeding, labelling and serving customers. We  made tea and served cakes in the makeshift kitchen in the damp summerhouse.  The BBC came to film me as a follow up to winning Gardener of the Year and the following weekend we were mobbed with wide-eyed visitors. A surprising number of customers came here and bought plants that first year. I was both grateful for the cash and panicky about how to replace the stock for next year.  I learned seven hundred botanic plant names in five months. 

At the end of September we closed for the season. And finally, after that frenetic summer there was a a little time to step back and think properly about the garden. To my eyes it was in dire need of improvement. It's an good rule of thumb that when you take over a new, established garden you should leave it alone until you know what's there. It's a rule I largely obey, except when it comes to lawn. Personally, I think lawns are only any good for: 

• Resting the eye in order to show off something more exciting 
• Offering a nice firm surface you can walk across to get straight to the more exciting thing. 

So this achingly dull area was first against the wall. I got bored of mowing it after ten minutes. I don't know how Peter stood ten years of it. If you know the garden, this is at the top. The yew hedge is on the left and the canal border on the right. We dug it up in February 2008.

And, to cut a long story short, this is what it looked like in May 2009.

And a year later, in late summer... (pic taken facing the other direction)

Emboldened by this first success, I embarked on a quest to reduce the garden lawns to the minimum I felt we needed.  The orchard was next. The trees were set into prim little circles in the lawn, giving us another mowing and edging headache. It also looked a bit stiff and un-orchard like, to me.

We hired a turf cutter and some muscle in the shape of Tim to wield the beast (which had clearly been designed for use by someone a foot taller than me and twice the weight), stripped off the turf and lightly rotovated it.

We underplanted with drifts of Narcissus Hawera and sowed it with a perennial wildflower mix, with some cornfield annuals in to add a bit of something in the first year. And here it is in August of the first year. I was on a roll now - no turf was safe...

This Cedar tree had been surrounded by a ring of weak shrubs, each planted into a small circle cut into the lawn. We took the shrubs out one by one, leaving the poor tree lonely in the corner. It's not in a great spot to be honest - it's too close to the yew hedge. But I decided to leave it be. This was taken in Feb 2010

In winter, you can see through to this area from the house. A couple of weeks earlier we had watched a flock of fieldfares, redwings and song thrushes strip the berries from a Sorbus 'Joseph Rock' nearby. Enthused by this spectacle we decided on a bird border, to include plants which carry berries and seeds for birds. And here it is in August 2010, six months after planting. 

And we've made huge changes back in the nursery too, mostly behind the scenes, but out here on the nursery the plastic trays on the gravel floor have gone in favour of new raised benches - so much better for us, the plants and for visitors too. We grow completely peat free, with organic plant feed. We use no chemical weedkillers and control pests with biological controls where possible.

So yes - I think we can give ourselves a bit of a pat on the back.  We've come a very long way in just five years.

Huge thanks go to two invaluable people.

To Peter, who works here with me tirelessly all year round, maintaining the garden beautifully and generally fixing everything that needs fixing from plumbing to rabbit fencing. He knows what needs doing when and just gets on with it. And what he doesn't know about wildlife isn't worth knowing. He's a star...

And to Janet, whose love of plants, top-class potting skills and close attention to detail, her supportive approach to my many madcap notions and general all round thorough niceness to everyone has made her a true ally in getting this place into shape over the five years. Janet - you're quite priceless.

Thanks due also to Tracy (now emigrated to Harrogate), Sally, Marilyn and Ewan too, for all their sheer hard work potting, weeding, lugging things about and cheerfully turning up in all weathers.  And 'Tiny' Alison at weekends. Hope the wrist is fixed for Easter.

And of course, hubby Dave who agreed to all this madness in the first place and Hazel and Holly for chipping in when needed.

There is so much still I want to do. I've tackled barely half the garden so far and have plans way beyond our days and means. But it's OK. I plan to be here for at least another ten years so I should be able to make a start. 

Bluebell Cottage, five years on. Part One...

Five years ago today a large removal van pulled away from outside our old, rambling Victorian house with all our worldly goods inside and drove 20 miles south down the A49 to Bluebell Cottage. We followed behind with two cats and one daughter (we dropped the other daughter off at Uni to save space) and attempted to squash our belongings in through the charmingly bolt-studded front door. As cottages go, it isn't tiny - it was once home to at least three labourers and their large families. Their confined, cold lives here are unimaginable.  But for a family of four twenty-first century adults with a lifetime of accumulation, scaling down to two and half bedrooms was more than a little tricky. Half of our stuff had been dropped off at charity shops in Warrington in the months before, but we still put much of it into the garage here in boxes. Some of it is still there.

It felt then, and almost certain was, an act of madness. I still occasionally wake up sweating, remembering that we hadn't completed on our old house and that we bought this place on a self-certified mortgage - effectively a wing, a prayer and a couple of optimistic signatures. We could only have afforded the double mortgage for about six months before we ran out of cash. We were lucky.

But we weren't buying a house. We were buying a new life for us all and a new career for me -  a plant nursery, a 2 acre garden open to the public for six months of the year, a meadow and a lovely little piece of woodland. There happened to be a house on it. Fixing up the house could wait - we had higher priorities.

But nothing much had been done in the nursery or garden since the For Sale sign went up in August 2006. Ten thousand unsold plants sat rooted into the gravel, riddled with hairy bittercress and liverwort, draped with the dead remnants of the previous summer's growth. Many had not been potted on for two years and were splitting their pots with roots desperate for escape.

The large back polytunnel was full of wide, high raised benches - so high that I couldn't reach the middle without a stepladder - and packed tight with barely alive plants. Somewhat disturbingly the benches were covered in a polythene wrap of bacon packaging.

Naturally, no new plants had been ordered for spring delivery. The greenhouses were stuffed with trays of dead cuttings and seedlings. And of course, I also hadn't the first clue what half the remaining plants were, let alone how to grow them. My training for this job was 20 years of weekend hobbyist gardening, one day a week for a one year at Reaseheath College and too many years sitting in an office. I had a lot to learn.

The garden too had been left to its own devices since the previous summer. Almost two acres of mixed borders needed a massive clear up exercise before visitors could be let in. And I had almost no idea what was underneath all that dead top growth.

 

Some horrors needed no uncovering. These plastic gems were in a little woodland corner in the garden.

A few weeks - or even months of run-up time would have helped, but the nursery was listed in the RHS Plant Finder as opening to the public on the 17th March - three weeks after we moved in.  And the garden was due to open for the National Garden Scheme on the 26th April. The great, the good and the curious of Cheshire would be dropping into to admire our beds of weeds, dead perennials and clogged up ponds in 8 weeks time.

To be frank, those first few weeks were not the best of times. Of course everyone rallied round. Dave helped out at weekends, family members mucked in, I contacted the staff who'd been sent home in September and they came in and did everything they could. We hauled out weeds, swept paths, threw away dead plants, ripped up rotten carpet tiles, re-felted roofs, cut back a year's worth of unkempt growth in the garden and tried to organise and label the remaining stock. We hid trays of weed-ridden plants stuff behind the sheds, roped off tunnels full of near-dead plants and opened a presentable looking nursery on 17th March 2007.

Five weeks later we opened for the National Garden Scheme. The sun shone and 130 people turned up, nodded approvingly and ate all the cake.

I stood at the entrance on that first NGS day in the spring sunshine, clean, smart-ish and sporting an exhaustedly weak smile. I clearly recall so many people told me what an idyllic life I now had and how lovely it must be to be here. I think I said wearily, 'ask me again in a few years'. 

Part 2 coming up in a day or two....

In the beginning...

It's five years this week since Dave and I moved into Bluebell Cottage and I am still asked quite regularly how we ended up here. So here's the story, with the benefit of the sharp perspective of a rear-view mirror.  Go on, you know you want to know...

Dave and I ran an IT company together, both working full time there from 1996 to 2006. He was happy enough, but I had become desperate for a change. I slowly dropped into part time work, studying at Reaseheath College for the RHS Level 2 in Horticulture one day a week, and volunteering as a gardener at Dunham Massey for half a day too. To say I was an avid gardener would be something of an understatement. I kept a blog, Diary of a Weekend Gardener.

I don't remember why, especially, but I sent off an application for the BBC's Gardener of the Year competition that summer. I have never entered a competition before or since - I don't even buy lottery tickets. To cut a very long story short, I got through the Q&A round, survived the garden visit round and made it into the final. A few weeks later I drove to Tamworth with my valiant assistant Hazel (our eldest) in a large white van to build a real garden for a family of five against the clock and under the merciless eyes of a barrage of TV cameras. After three frantic days of garden building and question answering, Joe Swift told me I had won and gave me a pretty little glass trophy. The programme was filmed in September 2006 and broadcast in December 2006. 

A few weeks before filming, I had visited Lodge Lane Nursery, looking for plants for the competition garden. The place was clearly badly run down, but the plant range was fantastic, albeit weed-ridden.  I found a chap called Rob, who was attempting to weed one small corner of a huge polytunnel. He explained that the original owners, Rod and Diane Casey, had moved away two years ago. The new owners had soon found that running the place was beyond them. Key staff had left and the remaining people were struggling to to cope.  But he helpfully found me many of the plants I wanted and sent me for a wander round the (closed) garden while he tidied them up.

A few days later, I suggested to Dave that we might go there for a walk along the nearby River Weaver (and to pick up a few more plants of course). The ever-helpful Rob once again sent us for a stroll in the garden. We walked up between the apple trees, heavy with fruit, and stopped at a seat at the top. The sound of a heavy diesel engine chugged towards us on the other side of the hedge and we peeked through, expecting to see a tractor. It was a canal boat. The garden backs onto the towpath side of the Trent and Mersey canal. Dave was clearly impressed and said 'You know we've been thinking of moving when Holly (our youngest) finishes college? Well, if this place came on the market, it would be perfect...' I said, 'Dave, we could never afford it, and anyway, whoever lives here isn't going to sell in a million years...'.

We went to collect our plants from Rob, said our thanks and goodbyes and went home.

Three days before I left for Tamworth, I realised I had a bit of money left in the meagre £1,200 garden build budget. I drove back to Lodge Lane Nursery to see what I could pick up. There were two signs on the gate. One said 'Clearance Sale, All Plants Half Price'. The other was an estate agent's 'For Sale' sign. I phoned the estate agent from the car, then took a deep breath and phoned Dave. 'Do you remember that place by the canal, the one you said...' He remembered, of course. The asking price was more than we thought we could raise, but the place was in need of a lot of work.... Dave's advice was sound. 'Forget it for now, get that competition out of the way, and if you win it, we can talk about it when you get back..'

Well, I won the competition and five months later we bought the cottage, garden, nursery, meadow and woods. And that, folks, was just the beginning...  

Dave still runs the IT business - I'm still closely involved but rarely need to go there now. His commute is now twenty minutes instead of two, but this is a fabulous place to come home to.  I run the nursery and gardens and Dave mucks in on summer weekends. I finished the RHS Diploma in 2010 and have a host of new friends, new skills and fresh adventures under my belt. It's turned out to be the best thing we've ever done. 

Philosophy and the art of apple tree pruning

Present me with an apple tree in need of pruning and I become a touch philosophical. I could write a book about pruning a single tree - not so much about the technical how-tos of the pruning itself but about the whys and wherefores. The vexed question of how much to direct the tree by pruning and how much to let it be the tree it wants to be. The temptation to satisfy my aesthetic sense and remove a wayward branch, set against the tree's innate instinct to grow as it sees fit. Does the tree know best? Whether to let a fat bud burst into flower, or whether to sacrifice it in favour of its better placed neighbours. Do I know better?  The impossibility of capturing an entire, graceful, rounded tree on a small, flat, two-dimensional photograph. How the palest grey branches turn black when viewed against a near-white winter sky. The ladybirds sheltering in the bark crevices, the robin perched on a bouncing twig two feet away, black-eyed and hopeful.

And around me, a scattering of mahogany-hued prunings, offspring-in-waiting if I only had rootstocks to graft them onto. The buzzard wheeling overhead and the slow-moving blue and red canal boats lapping softly through the brown water nearby.  If I was a poet, I'd write an entire book of poems -  perhaps Zen and the art of apple tree pruning. Preferably something less plagiaristic. 

Apple blossom (1.)

I think the cause of all this musing is the relationship which develops over time between the tree and the tree pruner. Each cut is a response to how the tree grew last year, which is in turn a response to how I pruned it the year before. Apples develop where I asked for them two years ago by pruning a new spur. Young branches exist because I encouraged a branch to grow there by leaving a longer leader. 

Perhaps, like dogs, apple trees come to look like their owners. Mine are in generally good health, minor flaws are accepted or ignored. They are allowed to grow into their natural overall shape, but pruned to control excessive growth. I feed them sparely and avoid chemical treatments. Mostly they are slightly over productive. They could do with thinning out in June but like me, they aren't great at prioritising. 

Spartan apples

At least  they all have names now, my five teenage foster-trees. With help from Derek Jones at Reaseheath College we finally identified the large tree near the nursery entrance as Winter Gem. It's badly cankered from the ground up but still productive. The others are:
Egremont Russet (foppish and a little weak),
Spartan (sturdy and fecund),
Monarch (buxom and rosy cheeked),
Bramley (energetic and bountiful). 

I planted a Laxton's Superb maiden last year, trimming its whippy six foot leader down to 4 feet to make the mature tree more accessible. It's forming its first baby branches now. If I live here long enough I plan to climb it when I'm 90. 

Dave shot some video footage of me pruning apple trees yesterday. I should have spent this last hour editing the footage to provide a helpful 'how-to' video. But writing is infinitely more enjoyable than battling video editing software. So you'll have to wait a few days for the practicalities and settle for my idle musings in the meantime. 

Most of our 2010 crop

1. The observant amongst you may look a little closely at this apple blossom image and decide that it all looks a bit of a tangle underneath that froth of pretty blossom - hardly a masterful example of apple tree pruning. You are undoubtedly right. It's an old image, but a fetching one nonetheless.

All I want for Christmas....

Want to buy a plant for Christmas for the gardener in your life? My guest blog on the BBC Gardener's World website might help....

         Sue's Guest blog on BBC website

How to: put on a tree tie

It's bare root planting season and if you do one thing this winter, plant a new tree.  I don't buy the 'my garden is too small for a tree' nonsense. The floor space that the trunk of a small tree takes up is negligible. The shade it will cast is either too little to worry about if sits to the north of your garden, or a welcome break from the sun's glare otherwise. Choose the right tree (a subject for another day) and you'll get blossom in spring, fruit for you or to bring in wildlife in the autumn and it will make your garden properly three dimensional. Show me a garden that doesn't need a tree and I'll  - I'll call it a balcony.

Anyway. I digress. I watched the Christmas edition of Gardener's World on Friday 9th December and among much to enjoy, one little clip had me reaching for the replay button. Monty planted a gorgeous new apple tree and wrapped a tree tie round it in a figure of eight. I empathised immediately. A few years ago I stood with one of those long rubbery tree ties in my hand and messed with it for ages trying to work out which bit went where. Perhaps it's a girl thing, but instead of giving up and wrapping it round randomly, I went online and looked it up. I know I'm being unfairly sexist, but men never RTFM.

So, here it is, no whizzy music, special features or celebrities. The chickens refused to get involved too. But, when you find yourself with a tree tie in hand, wondering which bit goes where, you'll be back...

33 degrees south....

For each of the last five years I have blocked out two clear weeks in my diary in November to make space for a proper holiday. And each year it's been whittled away - (I'm going to mostly, but not entirely fairly, blame Dave) - until we've been left with three nights, two days and a long drive either end to somewhere windy, wet and barely above freezing. Top destinations in recent years have include the Llyn Peninsula (North Wales), Christchurch (Dorset) and the lovely, if foggy, Langdale valley (Cumbria).

But I was 50 earlier this autumn and in a moment of wonderfully romantic exuberance, Dave promised me a fortnight in South Africa. There were witnesses. So we left cool, rainy Manchester behind one November evening and flew south through a long night, watching on the little screen as the plane inched down that marvellous graphic of the sun's curved light and shade pattern on an oddly rectangular planet. We dropped through the southern sky and into Africa as the sun rose.

We'd seen snatches of the South Africa v. Australia test match the week before, played at the Newlands, with the sun blazing in a hot blue sky over Table Mountain. I packed one fleece. But this is Cape Town and the weather is nothing if not fickle, and we landed in exactly the weather we left behind - 11C and raining. The same, but most assuredly not the same.

(Bear with me for a minute or two longer. I assure you we'll be back to plants in no time...).  Let's be frank. The details of other people's holidays are always a little dull and faintly depressing. Photos of slightly sunburned people smiling maniacally into the camera with some lesser known monument over their shoulder accompanied by enthusiastic, lengthy tales about people you've never heard of and they will probably never see again, all enjoying themselves hugely while you were working. So, I shall spare you the details and give you the potted summary.

We were sandblasted in a gale at Cape Point. (The picture above is not quite Cape Point, which is a little less scenic than this nearby view). We passed a group of bikers on Harleys n the Cape Reserve coast road with an ostrich in hot pursuit. We admired the posh yachts in the smart new V&A Waterfront and the huge moray eel in the aquarium. We ate and drank like royalty for not very much money. We slept wonderfully as long as the curtains were heavy and blocked out the blazing morning sun. We almost lost a borrowed canoe in a sudden storm on a lagoon in Wilderness. We didn't see whales or swim in the sea (too late for the former and too windy and wild for the latter). Neither did we visit the much lauded Stellenbosch. We just couldn't be bothered with all that restauranting. The Cape is rich, poor, beautiful, energetic, enterprising, struggling, young, optimistic, threatened, scenic, windy, proud, welcoming and astonishingly westernised. I loved it.

There. That's the holiday basics dealt with. But there are some proper treats I want to share with you - knowing that my audience here is largely of a horticultural leaning. The Cape, as plant devotees there are keen to tell you, is home to one of of the world's seven distinct major floras, and by far the smallest. (Most of the northern hemisphere above 40deg North is all defined as one flora, so you get the picture).

So, emboldened by Dave's developing interest in plant-shaped things, we did a bit of plant-spotting on our travels. By the end of the fortnight he could tell his Leucospermums from his Leucodendrons and had actually stopped by the side of the road twice to let me hop out and snap something that had caught my eye.  Of course we visited Kirstenbosch (twice),  the Cape's famous botanic garden. We bought a couple of wildflower identification books and tried to make sense of a totally unfamiliar plant world. Call it a busman's if you like. But it's in my blood now. Seeing plants that are new to me just makes me happy.

So here you go. A few choice shots from Kirstenbosch to get you started.
Just a few from the Protea family. So much more to come...

A close-up of a King Protea in Kirstenbosch. We searched for these, finally concluding that we'd missed the season before following the song of a sugar bird and finding them close by.

A perfect King Protea. It's the size of a man's two cupped hands.

Leucadendron discolor. I love the waxy, greenish-lemon petals of this cone flower.

Leucanthemum catherinae.
So named for its resemblance to a catherine wheel firework when viewed from above. I preferred it from this angle.

Stunning Leucospermum reflexum. There's a pretty yellow version too.

You get the picture. Just a small selection of the stunning plants that greet you at every turn. Plant porn, if you wish. Or as I prefer it, essential research in an area of huge personal interest......





But what makes Kirstenbosch so special isn't just the plants. It's the setting.

Look up, and every plant is framed by the back of Table Mountain. You can simply walk out of the garden up into the wild Fynbos area that inspired it and to the top of the mountain if you choose.....

....or look down and you see across Cape Town's suburbs to the mountains beyond and to Table Bay. Everywhere there is a view. Every picture has a frame.







That'll have to do for now. Back with a bit more from the Fynbos in a few days......

Well almost all for now anyway. This is the plant nursery at Kirstenbosch. We almost missed it as you have to walk through the gift shop to get to it. But it is surely the most lip-smacking nursery on the planet, stuffed with plants which are only found in the wild within a few miles of its doors.

Yes we bought some protea seeds and the necessary smoke papers to grow them on. Yes, I know it is futile but I really don't care. No, we won't ever get them to grow in the garden but it will be fun trying.








And finally, truly finally, there was a stunning display of sculpture in the garden under the collective title 'Untamed'. I was wowed.