When I moved into my current house, 10 years ago, there was very little of interest in the garden. The house had been refurbished by a builder, who had merely cleared the top growth from the garden to make it look tidy. The back garden, 18ft by 50ft, was half paved, with irregularly-shaped flowerbeds.
Apart from a newly-laid 8ft-deep patio behind the back door, the garden was a mess of old slabs, gravel, concrete and low brick walls and a defunct pond. At the bottom of the garden, the old rotten shed was screened by a wall covered in ivy, which completely covered the shed, the fence and a stunted conifer and yew tree. The back of the garden was a jumble of brambles, which grew back in the first year I was there. There were four trees - an old apple tree which had been severely pruned to a stump, a self-sown silver birch and the stunted yew tree and conifer. There was a deep pink camellia, a gold-variegated eleagnus and a cotoneaster.
And then there was the mystery grape-vine which outgrew everything - later identified as a Vitis Coignetiae. This vine was famous in the street - the previous owner of the house had told everyone that it was very unusual, and "a man from Kew Gardens had come to look at it and had taken a cutting because they didn't have one" I don't know whether this is true or not, but the vine is special. It is late to come into leaf, looking dead until May, when it produces dull green flowers, hardly visible under the dinner-plate sized leaves. Once in leaf it starts to grow like Jack's beanstalk. When I moved in, it had been cut back to the stump. After leaving it a year it had grown the length of the fence (50ft) and 2/3rds across the width of the garden, smothering everything in its path, including the rampant ivy. In autumn the leaves turn a brilliant orange/brown/yellow which lights up the garden in the autumn sunlight. I love my vine. My neighbours don't. When they replaced the fence, they asked if they could cut it right back. "Oh yes", I said, "no problem" - and my neighbour's face lit up. "You won't kill it" I added, and his face fell. Since then, I have kept it to my side of the fence as far as possible, to avoid it being a nuisance, but it is a regular winter job to prune it hard, and then in summer I have to cut it back regularly to keep it within bounds.
The Vine November 2005:
And 2006, after replacing the fence:
The front garden was part wide irregular flower border, with the rest covered in gravel. Only a few old rose bushes, long past their best grew there.
So the last 10 years has been spent gradually removing brambles and concrete, moving paving stones and erecting arches and obelisks and adding a couple of simple round ponds. I worked gradually, over about 5 years, to bring the whole garden under cultivation section by section, with a number of successes and failures along the way.
In my next blog, I will describe the garden as it currently is - my starting point for 2010.
