Wanna buy a garden (with a nice house attached)?

Well there’s no point beating about the bush – we are selling Woodridge.

For a bunch of reasons that I’m not going to bore you with, we’ve decided to put the house on the market. We don’t know where we’re going yet, but we will probably look for somewhere that brings us a little closer to Simon’s family and maybe even nearer to a few of our friends.

I cannot tell you how difficult a decision this has been. We have a beautiful house in a beautiful garden, and we’ve met some amazing people in Shaftesbury who’ve made us feel incredibly welcome in a short time. 

But it is what it is, and we’re looking forward to whatever comes our way in the next stage of our adventure together.

Getting the garden ready 

Once we decided to sell, everything happened quickly. Photographing the house was easy, and we had a great photographer doing it. But capturing the garden was a challenge as the weather turned against us for days on end. And no-one is particularly inspired by pictures of a garden in pouring rain. 

Eventually he managed to get some nice shots on a sunny day, with the magnolias doing their usual mad thing. I will miss them when we’ve gone. 

I was a bit worried that the trees weren’t in leaf and wouldn’t look their best for prospective buyers, so I made a book of photos illustrating the garden through the year. Colourful spring flowers, lush summer borders, gorgeous autumn leaves, peaceful winter snow. We leave it out for the agent to show people during viewings.

We accelerated the post-winter tidy up, with Laura’s help of course, and the place looked great when the agents launched the sale. (That’s what they call it: a launch. Like a ship. Or a product, which I guess it is.)

So have you sold it yet, Lorena?

No.

The house has been on the market a few weeks and there’s been a fair bit of interest. So far, no offers, but it’s only a matter of time. It’s, um, non-standard, and that needs the right person to fall in love with it, as we did.

Some people have been put off by the fact that the garden’s on a bit of a slope – regular readers will have noticed that – but then so are half the gardens in Shaftesbury (and indeed almost anywhere that isn’t an actual floodplain).

And if you don’t have a bit of a hill, you also don’t have those wonderful views.

They’ve got that bloody leaf blower out again

We’re in a kind of limbo. Gardening right now is all about keeping the place spick and span for viewings. It’s the same with the house – tidying it to within an inch of its life any time someone comes to view it. (I will neither confirm nor deny that I straighten pictures with a spirit level.)

We’re not doing the usual hectic May things. The greenhouse isn’t full of plants and seedlings. The vegetable beds are bare. I’m not eyeing up dozens of pots ready to spread summer bedding everywhere.

Instead we’re mowing (there’s no time for No Mow May when you’ve got a house to sell), strimming, weeding and obsessively blowing paths for a pristine finish.

Flowers happen anyway

I’ve got a few hanging baskets and flowers in pots, and the garden itself is going gangbusters. Right now there’s roughly a dozen rhododendrons and azaleas in various states of flowering, while still others wait their turn. The handkerchief tree is a riot of soft white bracts. Hawthorns are covered in buds, just in time to live up to their name of the May tree.

Elsewhere there are alliums, anemones, bluebells, chocolate vine, choysia, columbines, cornus, euphorbia, forget-me-nots, geraniums, lilac, Solomon’s seal, spirea, tulips, viburnum, wallflowers, weigela, Welsh poppies and lots of wild garlic.

What happens next?

We’ll keep pottering around and maintaining the garden. We’re definitely not going to be like the people who sold us our Orpington house – the minute we agreed to buy it they stopped mowing, weeding, anything. That place was a jungle when we moved in.

We’ve spent a lot of time and love on improving this garden and we want to hand it over at its best to whoever gets to live here next. 

But for now, as I said, we’re in limbo, at least until someone takes the plunge and offers to buy Woodridge. Watch this space.