Hard work does not make a great garden. It’s just – hard work.

Here goes:

Charles removed a dripping window.

We both removed a spiral staircase:

Now it’s like this:

Anne hand painted some bedroom walls.
 

And garden work went on remorselessly.

Look – I cannot honestly make this fun. It was tough. And here’s the thing you need to bear in mind if you are kind enough to stay with me and see these photos: hard work does not make a great garden. It’s just – hard work. Stick with me – we get to plants and more exciting bits soon, but I shouldn’t skip the slog. It’s important that you have some idea of the reality, isn’t it? I’ll do the history of the Crescent Border in the next post – lots of plants.

We had electricity and water piped around the place. Missed some critical places, of course. Ideally you’d do this after the garden was made and you know just what you need. And we didn’t find any archaeology.

Man being a mole!

 

​We got the electricity pole AND the telegraph pole at the other side of the garden removed, for free. The electricity one because it went across the meadow legally far too dangerously low – so they moled it underground. Wow. Wonderful process. The telegraph pole was moved because, I’m embarrassed to admit, I shouted at the man who wanted us to have more wires going across the garden. Isn’t it frightening to know that worked?

We got a greenhouse – 1987.

Um – Charles!! (yes, it is me)

That’s better.

Got there!

 

Ha – I didn’t look cheerful for long.

We decided we needed a car park and Charles had the Brilliant Idea – to put it in the entrance to the Wood. It was one of those amazing problem solving brainwaves.

Meaning we had to move the greenhouse, which was in the way.

The moved greenhouse, surprisingly looking much better than today, partly because we painted it black and the paint has come off. The right hand side is a pic of tunneling damage.

 

One of the Big Machine times – making the car park.

Blimey, this is scary stuff.

Followed by me –

Yep, I laid the lot.

And I made a nursery next to the greenhouse.
I needed solid concrete bases, which was both expensive and labour intensive. So we saved bottles and buried them in concrete, as you see. To make this:
I made a little pond. With fish.

All gone – the Helleborus argutifolius got a (you guessed) disease after flowering and spreading magnificently. End of that plan. So our design changed and the pool vanished behind a hedge.

Good tip about that pool – it was a cinch: I made it just by burying an agricultural watering container. it was even a cool black. Agricultural merchants and builders yards are great places for ideas and materials.

Charles made a bigger pond.

After we had had a tree stump removed from by the house. I think we have had big machinery in maybe five times – this was another.

 

Pond in progress

Pond – thankfully – with reinforcing wire.

Charles finished the pond. (before we moved the greenhouse) Still got piles of wood waiting to be cut and covered…

And we had a Pond Opening!

 
Cutting the ribbon string……

Before that:

Charles had built some steps from the ground level up to the lawn.

That view more recently.

Very useful, that bloke.

We made a terrace by the pond:

Terrace at Veddw

Don’t know why that wooden construction we inherited was still there then. Don’t imagine I wasn’t hard at work here, just because I took a pic.

30 odd years later. Well, he’s earned that drink.

 

We heaved boulders out of the ground:

using an RSJ as a lever. We inherited this RSJ. It was being used – truly – to support one end of a clothes line and was buried deep in concrete in the lawn. Just in case someone’s knickers were terribly heavy? Getting it out of the lawn and shedding its concrete ballast was an early nightmare.

Not our clothes. For some reason this photo predates our purchase of Veddw House. Why on earth did I photograph her washing??? Was it really very heavy?

So – boulder extraction:

Charles would lean on the lever while I piled stones underneath the boulders to bring them up. It was quite some time before I realised that the levering was both easier and safer…

Yep, that’s me.

How come I was smiling??!!! And there’s the wonderful RSJ. I don’t know what we’d have done without it.

Here’s one successfully extracted boulder, achieved with help from Jessica, Charles’s mother.

And I bought a handful – literally – of yew seedlings

and grew them on. Then we planted them.

After several years of growing baby yews…

 

And the local Hardy Plant Society came to inspect in 1999.

No idea how that happened!

They probably thought we were mad.

 
I think that’s enough for now and I hope to get more exciting next time. Phew!

Charles:

In fact the car park in the wood, though necessary in order to accommodate the visitors we began to have, was an absolute pain. To start with it was too small. But the main problem was that cars had to drive off the road, pass the house, turn a right angle bend and get into the car park without finding another car trying to go the other way. Which would have been impossible. So much time was spent gesticulating and running around to tell people what to do. It was crazy!

And the new car park is also too small……

The steps onto the lawn were fun. It was impossible to measure exactly how many flights I needed to get them level with the lawn. I was just winging it really, and was lucky.

The pond was properly reinforced simply by more good luck. An engineer happened to visit the garden and pointed out that we were risking catastrophic collapse.

Happy, hard, days.