Well, the very weekend that we ventured into Wales  we found a house and thought – ok, it’ll do.

My first view of the house – and yes, that’s me in the lefthand corner. I think the red car is ours. We used to have to hit the starter motor with a club hammer to get it going.

 

Why did we think that? Well, it was shabby, damp, not at all country cottagey, even rather ugly. But filled all our requirements, if not our dreams.

Here’s the other side of the house.

The sheep didn’t come with the property. ‘But we like sheep’.

 

And here’s the context – an overview of Upper Veddw

We’re the red dot.

 

The Veddw (or The Fedw : that is a story in itself) is a small settlement about half a mile from the village of Devauden, in Monmouthshire.

There was no garden to speak of, which was just what I wanted. It gave me a clean slate. And the setting was amazing for a garden – the house right in the middle of two acres of grassland. It’s circled at the south side (on the right in this photo and up the slope, counter intuitively) by a line of old trees. This creates a kind of amphitheatre effect and is surprisingly symmetrical. It’s perfect apart maybe from sloping quite steeply to face the north, but I don’t mind that. Lovers of tender plants might, perhaps. And I might when I’m a bit older……

It’s got a lot of garden on it now, but this gives you a rough outline. It was basically house and grass in 1987. With sheep.

 

I bet you think we called in a garden designer. And men with machines.

Nope. The beginning was just me and a spade, with help from Charles when he wasn’t working.

I had no idea what I was doing, or going to do, or how to do it, or what with.

Totally bonkers.

Charles:

It seems like SO long ago that we were sitting on the side of one of the fields looking at the house and talking it over. And it was a long time ago. 37 years. Over half my lifetime (to date). I really had no idea what you had in mind, either. I think if I had, I’d have been freaked out. I don’t actually think you ever said “one day all this will be a garden”. I’d have thought you deranged. And as for doing it yourself (ourselves) on the kind of money we had at the time I’d have said that it was impossible. But there it is. Amazing.

Anne

Making the Front Garden

It was all very well making a garden in a London backyard, a bit different in two acres. And I intended to use the lot.

And, being British, to stop being overlooked by our neighbours. That’s a later tale for you.

 

I started by digging.

We were overlooked on most sides.

 

But I soon discovered that it was hopeless to think of digging the most part of two acres.

Then somehow, I do not know how, I discovered Ruth Stout. We had no internet, no Amazon, the local library was great but not so much for gardening. But I used to trawl secondhand bookshops looking for affordable garden books and I must have found her book somewhere. She changed my life and made Veddw possible.

She was a gardening pioneer who wrote the book “How to have a green thumb without an aching back: A new method of mulch gardening” which proposed deep mulching with straw, hay, or other organic materials to eliminate the need for digging, weeding, and watering. That copy, published in 1974, is on Amazon at £174.60. I really must have a look around and see if I did get a copy.

In a new garden such mulch is not readily to hand, but, greatly cheered and full of hope, I began by using the grass cuttings.

And there they are, on the right. No more digging!

 

But – yes, how were we going to mow two acres?

It was mostly lovely prospective mulch – ie lots of grass, but it needed cutting. (Oh, yes, one problem follows another when you’re making a garden.) And now I know how valuable ancient grassland is, which this was, I possibly shouldn’t have made the garden at all. (see Monmouthshire Meadows). I’m happy to say we have kept some as meadow. Another story for another day.

We needed machines. (yep, the money we did have was vanishing like water down a plughole). I got a little Hayterette

Great little machine. I used it rather like a strimmer and it coped amazingly.

 

Charles got a second hand (third hand?) Allen Scythe.

 

Here he is, apparently using it.

Then it all had to be raked up.

 
 

Charles

The Allen scythe, which was a slightly more modern machine than the one on that brochure, was anything but “light work”. It was an absolute beast. It had an 8 HP engine with a recoil start and used to shake like crazy. Yes, it drove the wheels, but turning it required enormous effort. My arms ached every time I used it. We needed it until we had less grass and we upgraded to a ride-on mower (though a totally inadequate one at first. Another story) However, we did discover an alternative mulch – sawdust from the local paper factory. I used to go and get huge trailer loads. And then we discovered carpet, but that’s probably another story.

Anne, continuing

Don’t take that as a recommendation of sawdust as a mulch.

Gardeners are often told that wood chips used as a mulch rob the soil of nitrogen. I’ve never found that to be the case and ultimately we have used enormous quantities of wood chip and bark for mulching. If you want to know more, try here. But sawdust did leave plants looking short of nitrogen.

There will no doubt be more about mulching, but before we could really get going on making the Front Garden we had another problem to deal with.

Our predecessors had made a pond in front of the house.

You can see the pond – the red dot. The purple dot is a telegraph pole bringing us electricity and being another horrible eyesore.

 

The pond was now full of muck, and sometimes smelly water, and an ominous Stag’s Horn Sumach was lurking alongside. The pond was made of white plastic, which had hardened and cracked, and underneath was a large layer of concrete.

It needed to go but I had no idea how we could possibly get rid of it. Or that tree, which has a reputation for suckering all over the place. And though I had no plants to speak of, I didn’t need a forest of sumach.

But, amazingly, a friend arrived to see our new home, bringing two tough and enthusiastic children along. And between us and a sledge hammer we smashed it up and wheelbarrowed it away. Including the tree. Where all that stuff went I have now no idea, and I hope I don’t encounter it one day unexpectedly.

A long way from all that to this:

 

More next time! What did we do next?