Decisions, decisions, decisions – do you love them or hate them? I love them but, as a fairly typical Libran, I find them tricky. I can see both sides of almost any argument. I don't really believe in any of this stuff - mankind divided into twelve types - but I do seem to be a typical Libran. New aquaintances guess I am a stronger sign, like Leo or Taurus, but other Librans spot me a mile off. Very weird.

Anyway, in business I have taught myself to make decisions more quickly than I would naturally. In my private life I find them more difficult and, in the garden build, I have had to spend the last some months making really major ones. Trees for example, are expensive, important and long lasting. Smaller plants are cheaper and easier to remove or re-position if you find they don’t work. However, on the whole, it is not planting decisions that have been troubling me. It’s the hard stuff - stone, gravel and bricks.

Around here there is a wide range of local stone and brick colours from grey through creamy yellows to reds, so really I could choose any colours for the hard bits in my garden. But, like a child in a sweet shop, the more choice I have, the larger the problem becomes and the longer it takes to decide. And, after all, hard landscaping is pretty permanent. This is a one-time decision unless you have pots of money and time to remedy a mistake. I want, and need, to get it right first time.

I need stone for the kitchen and pond terraces and within the two major paths. I need bricks for the greenhouse dwarf wall and the mini walls around the terrace and I need something – bricks, wood, stone? - in the two key paths and as edgings generally.

A reminder of the garden plan

I managed to make one major decision relatively quickly (over about six weeks), which is to use ‘Cathedral’ limestone for the flagstones on the terraces and in the paths. And now the kitchen terrace has been laid (mostly), so there is no going back. It is lightly yellow/pink/grey with hints of darker orange, is not too riven but has enough ‘surface’ to make it non-slippy.  And, now it’s down, I am happy. It’s not as unusual as the stone I had on my London terrace but that was a one-off delivery from China and seems unrepeatable. Believe me I have tried.

So now, everything else is sort of going to have ‘hang off” or “work with” its colours. Lots of people have come up with ideas. Dermot has, of course, as have my wonderful neighbours, one of whom happens to be an RHS award winning garden designer, Robert Kennett.

You should understand that I have been inspired by a photograph of a path in a great book called ‘Gardening in a Small Space’ by Lance Hattatt. I thoroughly recommend this book and you can buy it for almost nothing (sadly) on Amazon.

I think this path is completely beautiful and want my two major paths to look like this  - ie the long, straight, 6ft wide path from the kitchen terrace which goes down the garden under the rose arches to the pond terrace, and the curving, 4ft wide one which runs from my side gate to the Kennett’s garden gate which joins our gardens together.

This path is grey stones and gravel and, for a long time, it caused me to toy with grey as a colour. Grey sets off the green of grass and plants so well. But I have decided against it. I am going with warmer colours again. Another decision made at last. But which warmer colours and how warm?

And I can’t copy the path in the photo exactly ie using railway sleepers as edges, because they won’t bend for the curving path. But I want to recreate the ‘essence’ of it with its pattern, using different sizes and textures of stone and gravel.

Those of you who have been following the blog since London times will know that I am keen to attract wildlife to my garden, particularly birds (except herons and magpies), frogs and toads, bees, butterflies and moths.

Unless you have the space for a wildlife meadow (which I don’t) the best ways to achieve this are to add trees and shrubs, lots of planting for cover, add water (preferably a pond or stream but any water helps), and plant lots of scented flowers in different colours so that the garden is scented throughout the year (especially with open bells and single, flat faced or open flowers that can be visited easily). Feed the birds and leave a bit of mess around somewhere (piles of logs, old bits of wood, old canes etc.) in a discreet corner for the smaller insects to nest in, feed on or hibernate in. You can also leave a few nettles and brambles because lots of butterflies and moths like to lay their eggs on them but I don’t need to bother with that. The farmer is doing it for me.

My new garden design and planting plans are designed to achieve exactly this but, even though there is nothing here now, ever since arriving I have been keeping a keen eye on what wildlife is around anyway, before I add my pond, trees, shrubs and flowers. And the great news is that it is already wonderfully busy.

Moths and butterflies

July was moth month. The entire house was filled with moths of an amazing variety most of which I had not seen before. I would have preferred them to be in the garden (they filled baths, covered walls etc) but, with the windows open and lights on, the inevitable happened.

Moth Black Arches

Butterflies too were abundant, especially red admirals, tortoiseshells and painted ladies. One of them died gracefully beside my bed and is still there – a colourful and delicate reminder of sunnier days.

The beautiful small tortoiseshell butterfly that died beside my bed

I suspect that the prolific brambles and nettles that are trying to invade the garden from the neighbouring field are responsible for this plethora of dainties but clearly I want to keep these spikey and stinging invaders at bay. I am removing them from the end of the garden because they are obscuring the view and wish to do the same at the side. It will be interesting to see whether I shall be visited in the same numbers next year.

Leggy things

In August I was thrilled to be visited by an enormous cricket. He must have been 5-6cms long, was beautiful colours, had huge eyes and legs and spent some time watching me through the glass on a French door. I’ve certainly never seen anything like him before.

The profile and undrneath of the huge cricket shot on and through filthy glass

In my London garden September was spider month but every month here seems to be spider month and most of them are indoors or around the windows. I think the cricket was after one of the flies trapped in one of the millions of webs that are spun in seconds.

September here was actually crane fly month – also inside not out. They were everywhere and often became trapped in the spider webs despite my clearing these on a very regular basis.

Frogs and toads

They are around because next door’s garden has them but the only one I’ve actually seen to date was a small male who found himself stuck in a watering can so was gently released into some cover in the field.

Birds

Despite removing most of the existing vegetation in the garden the birds are plentiful. My neighbours feed them well and have trees (as do I now - but more of that another time), so the garden is full of birds whizzing from side to side. Many are the same as in London. We have our resident robins, blackbirds – one of whom has a white feather, tits, goldfinches, sparrows and wrens. There is a pair of doves and a few pigeons, though thankfully fewer than in London.

Check this video out - my garden creators are also musicians

It is somewhat apt that in September 2014 the new garden resembled the Marne 100 years on – all vegetation, trenches, rain, endless mud and tangled barbed wire. Though clearly incomparable, as I sport my red poppy, I remember and honour those who struggled, fought, died and prevailed with a new appreciation.

Thankfully, the weather outside September has been glorious but, almost since I moved in, the site has been full of men, each one striving, giving their best and “going in” where less valiant ones might fear to tread.

The vanguard arrived in July. They were Mark Hawes and his team of three from Hawes Arborists. They arrived in their protective uniforms, armed to the teeth with chain saws, long cutters and a tree chewing device.

They made short but noisy work of the willows et al in the left bed plus the extraneous shrubs, trees and overhanging branches from the right. They were a great bunch: knowledgeable, experienced, courteous, hard-working, efficient and very cost effective. Mark lives in the village so it was great to be able to give this work locally – and a fine job they did too. They even cut up the logs for me to add to the log pile, were sweet to the dogs (who tried to get involved of course), and tidied up beautifully after themselves. They come highly recommended.

Almost immediately after the tree and shrub removal two major characters in what will become an unfolding story arrived – Dermot West, my wonderful garden landscape creator and Syd, the digger, so called because she was hired from Sydenhams, a fantastic store near Gillingham which can supply almost everything you need for house and garden destruction and construction.

I found Dermot online whilst I was still in London and, despite getting other recommendations from people I knew in the area, on meeting him here, I knew he was the man for my garden. He is based in Frome (about half an hour away) and his company is Eclipse Garden Landscaping. He can do anything - build pergolas and walls, lay stones and paths, dig beds, do fencing, even put up curtain poles in the house when it is raining  - and play the banjo and guitar, as you can see in the video.

Dermot is intensely hard-working, a joy to work with, dedicated to the job and seems to care as much about the finished outcome as I do. Let’s face it, when you are going to spend every day with someone for many months, it matters that you get on and see eye to eye. Dermot is my garden’s star. Syd is his accomplice. And Dermot can work Syd like an artist. He has obviously had a much misspent youth in computer gaming. The way Dermot plays the levers to make Syd dig, mix, filter and smooth out the ground, even in minute areas, is like watching any other artist at work – spellbinding and awe inspiring.

Dermot also came with two right hand men – 'Chris 1' (only so named because he was shortly followed by another Chris dubbed 'Chris 2'). Chris 2, I have discovered, is also an actor and can play almost any musical instrument including the double bass (as you'll see in the video).

No garden redesign that Dermot is managing can exist without levelling tools and very many tins of red spray paint.

So, together, Dermot, his spray paint and I translated my computer design into real, red lines on the ground. I made a few small changes, but not many - one extra path.

Then Dermot, Chris 1 and Syd removed the gravel sea and old terrace, dug all the existing and new beds to two feet minimum, dug the new pond to over three feet, put loads of clay into multiple skips and made a pile to create the base for a rockery near the pond.

I sold the gravel, the old terrace tiles and the greenhouse on ebay to lovely people and one of my neighbours took the shed, so the house became full of things that should be stored in garden buildings - just as my new kitchen was being installed. Life was fairly hectic. At one point there were seven men on site in any given day, all doing different things and I was buying milk in multi litres to keep the tea and coffee flowing - from the utility room!

Working on clay is a serious issue – and this clay is very serious, very deep and very compact. The only reasonable top soil was on the veg bed. Everywhere else, and obviously under the gravel sea, near the house etc., had no good top soil. So my first challenge was to create a fertile environment for all the plants I want to plant. And let’s face it, good soil is the basis of everything. Creating it is money well spent. It doesn’t matter how good your design is if plants can’t thrive.

A view of the clay as the pond is dug

From a myriad of books, websites and BBC Gardeners' Question Time, I knew I had to incorporate lots of organic matter, preferably well-rotted horse manure, to break up the clay. All similar recent advice also said that putting grit in was useless unless you did it in vast proportions. So I decided I needed horse manure and I would add grit to planting holes for specific plants as needed.

At the same time Dermot swore by the cooked, black compost made from the green waste at the tip. So, to begin with, and because I was having great trouble finding well-rotted horse manure in time, I agreed to use it. Seven tons arrived early one morning to take up most of my front drive. It turned out to be fabulous, black, friable and steaming. It was used in an instant and another seven tons ordered and delivered.

I have never ordered anything in tons before. I have ordered bags or even dumpy bags in London, but tons? Suddenly my life became full of seven or ten ton trucks delivering things - especially skips. And, can you believe, the man who does the horrendously regular skip swapping knows this house well because his grandparents once lived here.

But I didn’t think this lovely black, compost stuff was enough. There were no worms in my garden or signs of organic life except deep down in the clay of the pond. Cooked compost doesn’t have worms. So I set out on my pre-determined quest to find well-rotted horse manure because it is deeply rich, highly textured and normally full of good orgamisms with which to enrich and break up the clay soil.

First I looked online - my normal, London-based, response to any search. All I found was people complaining they couldn’t find any. It seems that those who have well rotted horse manure around here don’t advertise online or use ebay.

So I rang all the local studs – there are lots in the neighbourhood – but everything was too fresh or used on their own fields.

I asked everyone I met locally and in the village shop. The shop is a community one and staffed by lots of well-connected 'volunteers' of which I shall become one in good time - to no avail.

So I set out in the car. I had a hunch I had seen signs on the roads locally. One of my more annoying habits is that I am observant and have a wont to comment out loud on signs I see from a car. However, in this case, my “sign observing” has proved useful. I knew I had seen two signs for horse manure in my exploratory drives within 20 miles of my new home. I also have a somewhat photographic memory. So I wracked it and set off, first to a place between Gillingham and Shaftesbury where I was pretty certain I had seen a sign.

Wow, this new place is fantastic - fabulous village, lovely, friendly, interesting people and amazing views. It may be the "middle of nowhere" but it is very close to major roads (though you can't hear them) and Shaftesbury, Tisbury, Warminster and even Salisbury. My new home and garden is on the Dorset/Wiltshire border and I am in heaven.

So to the garden....having searched for a country garden of a quarter to a third of an acre, South-West facing and preferably not on clay, I have compromised – well one has to compromise somewhere. I have found my perfect new home so have compromised a little on the garden. It is only four times the size of the London one ie 120 feet long by 54 feet wide (not even a sixth of an acre with the front garden included!) so it’s still a “small” garden – plus it’s North facing and on the thickest, heaviest clay you have ever seen. So, despite moving from London to the Dorset/Wiltshire border, I shall still be writing about creating and gardening in a small garden on clay.

But now I have many new challenges – starting with the design.  

The situation

I have fantastic views which I need to incorporate and not encroach on too much. In London it was easy. Everything was fences onto neighbours’ gardens and I could hide them away with trees and climbing plants. Now I have a beautifully landscaped estate of farmland and magnificent oak trees to build into my view from the back garden and a wonderfully tree-filled hill view over a common to the front. There is not a house in sight from the kitchen even though I am in a terrace of cottages first built in 1880, plus around six other dwellings on our potholed, unadopted road known as "the track”.

The back garden view

Front garden view

Though North facing, the garden is remarkably sunny for most of the day because of the layout and height of the house.  And as someone said, the great thing about North facing gardens is that the flowers look towards the house, not away from it - something to look forward to. But is also quite exposed and windy being surrounded by open fields and commons. It’ll also be colder than London of course.

And the clay is horrendous. In this area I expected to be on chalk or greenstone or at least something not clay. However, I am on a huge seam of Kimmeridge clay which comes up from the Dorset coast. It is very deep and intensely solid – you could throw pots from it in a minute. The garden has very little added top soil except on the old veg bed.

Clay has its positives. It retains minerals and goodness generally so is rich in nutrients but it cracks when dry (which can cause root disturbance) and holds water, which is not great in a wet winter on a flattish site – think bogs and mud. The previous owners have installed under-lawn drainage pipes to stop it getting waterlogged but I am going to have to work through and around these to create my new garden.

The garden as I bought it

The planting on purchase was a whole bed of self-sown hedgerow willows down the left border, two small trees (Bramley apple and Robinia aurea ) at the front of the lawn and a Rhus typhinia, a Viburnum and a Sorbus at the end of the lawn - all obscuring the view. There was also a young silver birch and a contorted willow which I am endeavouring to build into my plans and keep.

However, between the house and the lawn is a terrace and then a vast sea of gravel about 15 feet long, 54 feet wide and 8 inches deep. The house feels miles from the garden and the gravel is Dorset flint which is big, sharp and extremely difficult to walk on for me, let alone the dogs. So the first thing I had to do when I arrived was to create a pathway across it, for all of us, from old planks and bits of wood I found in the wood shed.

The bridge across the gravel sea - almost biblical?

The second, of course, was to completely redesign it,  which I started doing whilst still in London.

The key design challenges

1. To bring the garden closer to the house, make it feel integrated and bring the wildlife closer for easy filming
2. To create height and interest without impeding the views. It is level-ish and wooden fenced
3. To add a large pond and create more plant borders whilst keeping enough lawn for Pickle and Lottie
4. To re-invigorate, widen and deepen the existing beds – only the veg bed had any reasonable level of top soil and signs of worm life
5. To create more planting areas for all the trees and other plants I want to grow
6. To site the new greenhouse, shed, compost bins and a washing line without them encroaching on the view or casting too much shade
7. To deal with the utilities. Our four cottages share a septic tank next door and all the pipes run through the back garden - somewhere?! The garden has existing drainage we have to work with, and I need electricity and water to the shed and greenhouse and pond pumps.
8. To keep reasonable access to the gate into next door’s garden so they can fill their oil tank via my side access – and to facilitate their popping over for a drink, as is their wont, plus dog and child swapping generally which is already a feature of daily life
9. To create cover for the unsightly oil tank and to disguise a large electricity pole
10. To create alternative privacy for my neighbours to the right. At the moment this is achieved by a bank of brambles and nettles in the dairy farmer’s field which encroach into my garden – not ideal planting companions!
11. The planting: to combine plant colours and textures. My last garden was so small it made sense to have a hot bed full of vivid colours separate from the cooler bed. And let’s face it, it’s much easier to do. But now I want to learn how to make them work together without banning a single colour. So there will be orange, purple, wild yellow and red alongside the easier pinks, blues and whites, plus greens, browns and maroons etc. - gulp!

Design process

I made lots of rough drawings but knew the design had to be to scale so a garden design program would be really helpful, as it was 11 years ago. I researched lots of potential garden design programs and eventually invested about £60 in one called Realtime Landscaping Pro 2014 from Idea Spectrum.

Overall, I am very pleased with it. It is easy to use, you can work in plan or perspective view, and view in 3D - as mouse controlled walkthrough or using video cameras. It has a good number of features and items to include in the plan, it’s easy to change them and it also does some cute things. For example, if you add a bird bath you get birds using it and if you plant scented plants you get butterflies fluttering around.

However, it is pretty American! You can choose from a thousand different modern house styles, decking types, swimming pools, patio stones and lawns but there is not a single climbing plant and only one vegetable in the plant list. I can’t imagine a garden without climbing roses, clematis, jasmine, honeysuckle, sweet peas, wisteria , even ivy, let alone the more interesting climbers. And I don’t want a vegetable garden completely full of cabbages either. I have offered to advise them on this for their next version but they have politely turned me down.

Initially I tried dividing the garden quite strongly into different “rooms” but it meant losing views or too much lawn with dividing features (hedges, walls, fences etc). So the final design remains a "whole", with different “areas”. I have incorporated some ideas from my London garden that worked well such as the low walls around the terrace which provide well-drained sites for alpines etc, the stream running into the pond and the rustic swing seat from Duckpaddle over which one can grow climbers, but otherwise it’s very new.

The new design

So the new garden will have a greenhouse in almost the same place as the existing one (which was correctly sited East/West and is in a sunny position). It is on order but won’t arrive until January which is OK for most seed planting. We shall build its base and brick walls in advance. It will be 10’x10’, not 12’x8’ so that it does not interrupt the sight line from the kitchen sink window, down the rose arches, to the view. A matching cold frame will sit the other side of it alongside an outdoor sink. The new compost bins will be at the beginning of the veg/cutting beds nearby.

I’ve moved the shed (which will be a new one) to the other side of the garden so it doesn’t block the Southern light through the side access to the veg garden.
There will be a long, six feet wide path up from the terrace towards the new huge pond and rock garden at the end of the garden. The path will be covered in black metal rose arches covered in climbers and have a long border down the left of it with a gap in the middle to allow movement to the left onto the lawn and to the right into the extended veg/cutting garden. At the end of the path will be more hard standing, the rustic swing seat and a bridge over the pond. I shall keep the existing metal gates in the fence at the end (but hang them properly) so that it looks as if the view through them is an extension of my garden.

The border down the left will be widened, the self-seeded willows (and everything else) removed and a peninsular bed added.

The sea of gravel and misplaced young tress will disappear and the lawn will come towards the house (accompanied by the long border). Two beds have been added nearer the house (so will be shadier beds – but shade beds are a fun challenge), with another around the trellis hiding the oil tank and one by the low terrace wall near the new side gate. The path from the side gate is four feet wide and ends up at the gate into the neighbour’s garden. Everything except the rose walk path is curvy - and it'll look a bit like this from where I sit and work.

The same view in the old garden looked like this.

So I am now happy with the overall design – all I need is someone to build it for me and clear what’s there at the moment…..watch this space!