Rip it out and start again

In the beginning...

In 2015, we bought an old sandstone house. The house was built in the 1830s and had been part of the housing provided for the administrators for a local mine. Our house was the paymaster or accountant's house and the first in the row of five. I have some ideas about the history of the house but much of the original features have gone. We do still have original sash windows in most rooms but the shutters have been taken out in all but one room; we have a couple of fireplaces and an original (and rotten) front door. The house had been empty for some time and the garden was a bit of a wilderness. There was clearly, at one point, a nice looking garden there but it was sad and overgrown when we moved in.

Some of the planting had some lovely old world connections with a holly bush by the front door, traditionally thought to deter evil spirits, clary sage, lemon verbena and thyme in amongst the yellow poppies and immature sycamore saplings from the two giant specimens in this little space. 

The seating was rotten, as was the fencing, and there were overgrown trees (why you would plant 8 trees in a 30ft square garden is beyond me!). 

Up to this point we had been renters, so my gardening experience was limited to growing things in pots and being very pleased with myself when they didn't die. 

So here I was - a very inexperienced gardener, overgrown woodland garden. Panic (and a little bit of hopelessness) set in. I was told by all and sundry to "leave it a year"...being a fixer by nature that was very tough, my fingers were itching to get in there. 

Of course, I dug things out and then went to the garden centre and wasted lots of money on plants that just vanished - eaten by slugs and snails, pooed on by badgers, foxes, thousands of pigeons and the seven local cats used to being able to do what they liked. There were tears and more frustrations. 

This view shows the old path which was being pushed up by the roots of the sycamores and was, frankly, quite dangerous. 

The photos above are a year apart - a good friend of mine who is a great gardener and seems to know everything - accompanied me on a sad walk around the garden where I whined about dry shade, wet shade, clay soil, roots, trees, awful bits of fences. 

"Many people would kill for a garden like this", she said. 

Hopefully, they wouldn't (!) but she then went on to tell me in no uncertain terms that I had to do the British thing and sort it out myself if I didn't like it. 

So - thus began the ripping out and starting again. 

The photo above was taken in February of this year - where my journey of trial and error (mostly error) began.