My Garden Story

I had inherited a gardener of a sort from the previous owners. Mert was really an odd job chap, he mowed and was very handy, so I asked him to move the dying silver birch and construct a post and rail fence on the western boundary. The southern boundary onto the main street, was a long thick border of agapanthus, with various trees, shrubs, a pretty, old fashioned rambling rose and red-hot pokers growing in it. There was nothing much that could be done, so I didn’t fiddle with it to begin with. To the east was a mass of tall timber forming the boundary with the neighbours, and a photinia hedge, while to the very important north, there were two huge gum trees and several small ones on the edge of a gully. This was a council easement I was told, as the storm water drain emptied into it forming a stream in which grew a clump of arum lilies, and near the street end there was a pond with yellow iris, and a mass of blackberries. That could also wait. The landscape designer was trickier. There are a lot in this area.  I didn’t want famous, and it took a while, but eventually I found a nice man, John, and asked him for a plan. As soon as I saw it, I should have known. He had drawn a turning circle in the middle of the drive where there was a nice space I fancied for a rose bed. The drive, though it had a very slight curve, was easy to back out of so I put a line through that. He designed beds all around the house, but to my untrained eye I couldn’t see that a couple of them were far too wide. Twenty years later I am still trying to make them work. Pete said four months for the renovations (it took five). Meanwhile, John came up with a planting list. I knew some of them but a lot I had to look up and if I didn’t like them, I drew a line through the plant and added a few things I wanted. A stone mason came and laid the courtyard and paths, and steps in the manner of Edna Walling. I moved into the house in October, and the planting was scheduled just before Christmas. It was a very hot summer, and on a brutal, blazing day three men arrived with trucks stuffed with trees and plants which they unloaded, stuck them in the ground, installed a watering system, turned it on, and left. It had taken just one day to give me an instant garden. The old trees, some planted even before the house was built in the 1970s, looked on in amazement. There were three big oak trees, a claret ash, two elderly crab-apples, a Manchurian pear, a deodar, and wonderful fruiting apricot, peach, plum and almond trees, prunus, and a weeping mulberry that I saved in the nick of time from a man with a chain saw. I will never know what he planned to plant in its place. I didn’t realise just what a feast I had inherited.  The new plants struggled in the relentless heat and some of them started to die despite constant watering. I rang John and suggested he come and have a look. He was most apologetic, and offered to replace the plants or give me a cheque for the losses.  I took the money, and decided that from then on, I would do the garden myself and make my own mistakes, which I did, and there were plenty.