In the Garden

Our relaxing place

Both me and my wife have spent several years building our garden to make it what it is today. We love that we can sit in our living room and just look out of the french doors onto the garden. I designed the garden several years ago taking advantage of the steep slope to allow the garden to spread over several levels always keeping some of the garden out of view and drawing you on to look around. We have a few sitting areas, a stream, ponds and waterfall as well as two stone buildings that fit comfortably with the landscape of the garden.

The folly

The folly was designed in part to hold back the soil and make use of the space that would otherwise just have been a retaining wall. The idea is that it is to look and feel a bit like an old stone building that has part collapsed over time. All the stone that was used to build the folly has been collected from the generous people that have given it away on recycling sites such as Trash Nothing and Gumtree. In fact all the stone used in the back garden was collected in this way with only a few pieces having been purchased from sellers on Gumtree. We do spend a lot of our relaxing time on the folly, the view from here looks down into the valley. Unfortunately some of our neighbours have allowed self seeded trees to take over a lot of this view but it is still a very pleasant place to sit. When we built the folly my wife took lots of photos and video of the works along the way, over time I will add some of this content to the website.

Front garden

The front garden was created ahead of my hip replacement surgery so that I had steps for me to climb because we were unsure if I would manage to climb the steep drive after the operation. For this garden I had to buy stone because of the time frame required to complete the garden before the operation. Here I am planting crocus in the newly created front garden. The area being planted is the meadow edge. This has been over sown with mixed meadow seed. The Garden was deigned with rainwater and wildlife in mind, having two mini ponds filled with the rainwater collected from our roof, this then overflows into a bog garden. Details from the design and build of the front garden will be added over the coming months.

Construction of the Ponds

The stream we created appears to the side of the folly and runs into the top pond, which in turn follows a short stream to a waterfall where it then falls approximately five feet to the lower pond. Construction of the ponds and waterfall required some planning with both ponds made of concrete and some very heavy stones used in the construction of the waterfall and for the banking around the top pond. This construction is another feature that will be fully covered on this web site in the not too distant future.