New home, new garden. What do we do with it now?

When we first viewed Woodridge we were overwhelmed by the garden. It was mid-summer and everything was ebullient, effusive, extraordinary. And just way too much to take in.

How the garden started out

The owner, Peter, showed us around. He told us the garden was designed in the 1930s by Muriel Hoare, who was related to the banking family of the same name. At that time they owned Stourhead House and their ancestors had created an amazing landscaped garden with exotic plants, shrubs and trees. Muriel raided the collection and brought some of those trees and shrubs to Woodridge.

We staggered about this incredibly lush garden and Peter kept pointing at trees and telling us their grand or exotic names. We only retained a vague idea of what the garden held, and what that would mean for us throughout the year, because we only had so much bandwidth. I mean, we also had an entire house to get our heads around!

It turns out we loved the house too, so we bought it!

Moving in and it’s already late autumn

We moved in at the end of October. It was a week after the end of daylight saving (always a depressing day in my calendar) and we had missed the best of the autumn colours. There were still some bright leaves hanging around but most were already on the ground. We’ll have to wait until next autumn to see the maples and other trees do their firecracker thing.

The first thing we bought was a leaf blower – lots of trees mean lots and lots of fallen leaves. It isn’t all wafting about with secauteurs and a Sussex trug, snipping the odd rose here and there. (By the way, my list of house hunting ‘must haves’ included a fairly low maintenance garden. That didn’t quite happen.)

But happily clearing a few sacks of leaves was all we had to do right then. Winter was coming – not to mention two more lockdowns – so we focused our attention indoors. Keeping warm, decorating the house and making plans.

The garden never (quite) sleeps

There’s not a lot to do over the winter. On fine days I’d mooch around, trying to work out what’s planted where. Sharing photos with my friend, Mark, who’d confidently identify plants then issue instructions or advice.

The winter garden is all about tiny events. Buds fattening. Courageous flowers emerging way too early. Birds appearing singly or in groups – hello bullfinches and goldfinches – foraging and flying off again.

It wasn’t until the start of the year that I really began to think about what happens next.

The point of this blog

The usual advice is not to do anything too radical in your first year. Watch and learn. See what comes up and where. What works and what doesn’t. Unless there’s something you really hate, in which case, rip it out! (More on box hedges in a later post.)

I need a way to record all of that – what I see and what I do. Words and pictures. Because there’s no way I will remember it all. So what might originally have been a notebook, became “some kind of weeknotes”, became this blog.

Because I have a thing about symmetry and neatness (not that you’d know it from the state of my room), I need to begin in January. Yeah, it’s already April. I’ll catch up. It’s not like I’m busy with a huge, demanding garden or anything.