The plot that grew a gardener. Where my story began… 

When I bought this cottage with my husband in 2016 I had no gardening experience, having always lived in London in flats with no outdoor space. Suddenly we owned a cottage in the country and a large overgrown garden, full of ground elder. 

My first garden was hugely overgrown and full of ground elder

On the advice of a neighbour we cleared the entire plot – excluding a few established plants that could be saved with restorative pruning. When we stripped it back we had a square blank canvas to work with and I had to learn about plants very quickly.

Our first move was to lay the rear to lawn with the hope that repeated mowing would weaken the ground elder.

Stripping out the planting at the back left a blank canvas that was laid to lawn
When the jungle was cleared, the functional parts of the garden were exposed – the oil and septic tanks

I turned my attention to the front of the house.

Front Garden

We rebuilt the approach to the house to create a circular patio and a lavender-lined path using reclaimed brick. 

There was some hard landscaping at the front but it was overgrown with weeds
The area to the East of the front door became a circular patio in reclaimed brick
The bricks used to rebuild the path came from the old hard landscaping at the back of the house

To the West I put in a large border, hoping to fill the front of the house with flowers. Knowing nothing about what to choose I grabbed a gardening catalogue and took my pick. Completely disregarding soil type or aspect I chose anything I liked the look of that had a picture of a bee and the words ‘perfect for pollinators’ on it. When the plants arrived I realised that, although I’d bought what felt like an enormous number of plants, they were tiny and barely made any impression on the space. 

The brick path wraps right around the house and meets a patio on the west side, outside the french doors
At first the plants seemed lost in the giant border
The plants soon filled the space and put on a good display
I spent more and more time immersed in the garden

While they did fill out and gave a good display that first summer so many were annuals or short-lived perennials that they soon faded. Many didn’t return the following year, being unsuited to the heavy clay soil and shade cast by the boundary hedge. 

Since then I’ve tried to fix that problem – adding more long-lasting plants to fill the border. It needs proper winter structure and that’s a task for the future. At the moment I often use this front border as a trial bed, to see if things work on an individual basis. It’s useful to have that space for experimentation and to see what appears through self-seeding. 

The front has traditional cottage planting with roses, perennials and a lot of self-seeded plants

Back Garden

Turning our attention to the back garden, the first thing we added was a compost heap
We planted a mini-orchard of fruit trees next
The back entrance was rebuilt which meant more hard landcaping was required within the garden
We repeated the circular pattern from the front but included space for planting
The pandemic followed very quickly after the completion of the landscaping which meant we used the planting space for vegetables
We grew runner beans, courgettes and potatoes
We began to add borders at the rear of the garden alongside the compost heap
We realised that the fruit trees were planted too closely to the rear fence
At first we sowed wildflowers
Gradually we added cottage-style perennial planting

The rest of the garden has similarly grown through trial and error. I’ve learned that the rear garden is shady and very dry – being surrounded by mature trees in the neighbours’ gardens. I also learned quickly about invasive species – having introduced a few myself before I knew better. From that point I threw myself into learning – reading a lot of traditional gardening books and listening to back episodes of Gardener’s Question Time. I followed up every plant referenced – checking its credentials and assessing its suitability for my garden. 

The garden has grown and evolved with us, going through its seasons of love and neglect. It suffered during my pregnancies and the early days of my babies’ lives, but it came into its own during the pandemic when we grew vegetables in the newly constructed landscaping surrounding the back patio. 

Now I think of it as a canvas of experimental art, a palimpsest, which has been reconstructed and wilfully destroyed and rewritten again and again. Over the past 10 years it has weathered lessons learned, altered circumstances and changes in personal preference. And it goes on growing…as did our family

Our family grew too which took us to a new home and a new garden…

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