Gardens

I hate having to deal with gardens. One of our present next door neighbours has simply paved his whole garden and converted it into an “outdoor room”, to use a contemporary description. 

We were almost as clever. We paved over half of our garden and used an algorithm with simple rules to design planting patterns in the pavers. The patterns were beautiful and could never have been designed in the normal way. Our “half area” garden is doing very well as it requires only half the normal time to take care of it. 

Our first house in Chiswick, London did not initially have a bathroom or a toilet. The toilet was in the garden and there was a small bath in the kitchen. It was a tiny thin terraced artisan’s cottage so the garden was also tiny and thin. We spent hours on freezing cold evenings listening to advice on what plants could survive in our small shaded garden. Some of them even survived so that we could listen to birds on the weekend. 

Our second house was in Australia. It was on a steep slope with two trees on the front lawn and two enormous trees entirely filling the back garden. 

After a car “driven” by drunk teenagers almost careered down the front lawn into the lounge where we were sitting, we decided to leave the trees on the front lawn for safety reasons. 

The back garden was another story. Not prepared to put up with living in the shade of those trees, we decided to have them taken out and replaced by a large swimming pool. We planted some shrubs around the pool and grew tomatoes at the very bottom of the garden. We were able to keep our gardening to a minimum, although we were stuck with mowing the lawn in the front garden under our protective trees. 

Our next house in England once again was much larger. It was on a steeper slope than our previous house. It even had a small ballroom with a sprung floor which we used as a lounge from which to observe the valley below. 

On a lower level was a swimming pool covered by vegetation. Below that was a section of woodland. Finally the lowest level was a water meadow adjacent to the River Clyst in which we had a mooring.

The first problem was to clear the pool which had been entirely covered by a creeper known as “mile a minute”. As its name suggests, the pool was difficult to clear but the forester we hired, managed to kill it all very successfully. We then fixed the filtration system and enjoyed some swimming in the Summer. As it faced South, the water was quite warm by English standards. Our neighbour, who regularly swam in the sea at Budleigh Salterton, refused to swim in it saying, “Its too hot”. 

We managed to clear a pathway through the thick woods below the pool where we tried to imagine an Australian rainforest. 

Unfortunately, there was nothing we could do about the sloping lawn so we were forced to keep and mow it using a rotary hover mower. The only gardening I did was grow hordes of multiplying dahlias on either side. Using wood formwork, we constructed a base on which I mounted a satellite dish from which to receive signals from around the world. We also discovered and with great difficulty, cleaned out a fish pond by the house. Although we installed a filter system and enjoyed many hours gazing at our carp, we would never contemplate having a fish pond again. 

Our next house was again in Australia in the beautiful waterways of Noosa in Queensland. The garden was full of nice cycads with a few palm trees, some of which were annoyingly huge. A lawn surrounded the house. Our only real problem was a stretch of shrubs beloved of redback spiders about which we could do very little. 

We had our own stretch of beach from which emerged roots of mangrove from time to time. We dug these up immediately before they became too big to deal with legally. We hired a nice man from Glasgow to mow our front lawn and I covered the lawn surrounding the house with commercial farm weed cloth and river pebbles before adding some very nice stepping stones. Aloe vera grows like a weed in Noosa so we let it grow in the more difficult places. 

It was now Tim to “Get smaller” so we moved back to England and bought an apartment overlooking the River Cam in Cambridge. “Overlooking” is not quite the correct word because we could just see the heads of rowers as they passed the apartment. If we opened our windows, we could also hear the loud encouragement of the cox as he spoke not through the old traditional megaphone but using some type of amplifier and speaker. 

It was here that we were introduced to the concept of the “HOA”, the house owners association, which collects money from owners to pay for gardening, cleaning and general management of the building. Here, I suppose it was the “AOA”. 

Our apartment not only looked over the river to the trees opposite but the back windows looked at a bank with trees at the top and sometimes flowers at the bottom. 

Of course, there was no gardening to do ourselves but we were able to enjoy the pleasant surrounding of the building and the river in front of it without doing anything.

Our most recent abode is a new terraced townhouse, definitely a step up from an apartment, on the southern border of Cambridge facing the Gog Magog hills and the legendary Nine Wells or nine springs which supplied water to Cambridge many years ago. 

It has a tiny back garden with just a lawn. We hate lawns. Therefore, the first action we took was to get rid of the lawn. After the lawn had been removed, we were annoyed to find clay with some building debris above it on which the grass had been growing with little evidence of soil anywhere. The builders had simply laid the turf over the clay and debris. 

Not deterred, we hired a nice man Dave to lay some pavers in a mathematically determined pattern over the clay and debris. Our algorithm, based on some rules regarding planting patterns, eventually produced a very satisfying result. Dave laid the pavers using our pattern and then moved the pavers near the fences to more centre positions. 

The next step was more tortuous as he removed the debris and clay from between the pavers and replaced it with soil. He also dug down next to the fence to accommodate some large fruit trees. 

Next came the planting of the fruit trees just in front of the fences on either side. We then took over and planted a selection of perennials and four Japanese maples. 

The most satisfying aspect of the garden in its first year was watching the bumble bees on some lavender which we had planted near the kitchen window. Every day they would come and spend time on each flower. Of course, this prompted us to plant some more lavender in any spaces left in the garden. 

Apple trees should not allowed to make fruit in their first two years but we allowed one tree to make a few apples. 

As a friendly offering, we took four of these apples and presented them to our neighbours who had the “outdoor room”. We were so pleased when they said they tasted nice. It helped a little to thank them for inviting us to so many of their barbecues. But it also marked the completion of our “half garden”!