We’ve tried and are still trying to create a little sustainable paradise, providing a little bit of joy every day. Although we work a lot in the garden, we do sit in all the seating areas regularly, even if only to just rest for a few minutes in between the work. Every seat has a little description of what we are trying to achieve.
Please sit down anywhere you like and enjoy the plants and the garden!
1. Patio chairs
We love our pots on the patio. Planted up with perennials they give a year-round display. Every now and then a few new plants will replace the ones that aren’t performing well. The pots are watered with either the grey water from the kitchen, the rinse water from the laundry or from the water butt.
Thanks to a water butt capacity of around 5000 litres and the consistent (military, some members of the family would say) use of grey water, no mains water has been used to water any plants in this garden this season.
The garden has a 60cm slope and as such water that is collected from the house roofs can easily be syphoned into the water butts at the bottom of the garden.
No mains water is used to water this garden.
2. Corner bench
This bench is one of the best places to both hide from the world and view our little paradise. The word paradise traces back to the Old Persian pairi-daêza, which literally means “a walled enclosure”. Enclosing a garden was of course a necessity when wolves and other great mammals were roaming Britain, both for safety and to protect crops and other plants from wild boar and deer among others. However, our continued desire to hermetically seal our gardens has led to the demise of the hedgehog and also stops amphibians such as toads to return to ponds to lay their eggs. A hedgehog needs to roam a few kilometres every night to eat. So all through the garden you will find holes in the fence and through the hedges. Sadly the last time we spotted a hedgehog in this garden is several years ago, but we do hope they will come back.
Hedgehog holes in fences allows hedgehogs and amphibians to roam for food and to reach locations used for hibernation and egg laying
3. Flower bed seat
Sometimes the best place to be is amongst the flowers. In her book ‘Good Nature’ professor Kathy Willis quotes several studies where visual stimulation of real flowers led to measurable reduction of physiological stress. But it’s not just us humans for whom flowers are essential. Many insect species are in rapid decline ie the UK butterfly population is down by 50% since 1976 (Dave Coulson). A succession of open flowering plants means that from late winter onwards the garden is buzzing. We don’t use any pesticides, fungicides or weedkillers and also have selected a flea treatment for our cat which doesn’t contain neonicotinoids or systemic pesticide.
Flowers are selected for both humans and insects. No pesticides, fungicides and weedkillers are used in this garden.
4. Picnic bench
The best time to enjoy any garden is when eating! We are forever trying -and very often failing-, to grow our own fruit, herbs and vegetables. If all fruit trees and shrubs produce we have cherries, apricots, peaches, grapes, apples, pears, plums, quinces, currants, blueberries, gooseberries and raspberries, although some of those need to move to a bit shadier position. We also planted three kiwi bushes and hopefully they will at some stage produce a good crop. In good years we have produced 90 litres of apple juice. In bad years, all the apples were eaten in December.
Growing your own reduces your carbon footprint, it’s free of pesticide and if you time it right, the food is absolutely delicious.
Enjoying home grown food.
5. Hammocks
From the hammocks you can see the squirrels run across all the structures in the garden and even jump from the walnut tree into the greengage. The latter tree seems to be feeding the pigeon population in the garden whereas we of course only see a walnut if it has been rejected by the squirrels.
The other thing you can see from the hammocks is the privacy zone between us and Wellbrook way. Since this was established, we have a huge number of birds in the garden who are enjoying the trees and shrubs in the privacy zone to nest and to forage. The blackbirds are grazing on our lawn (which was only cut down after No Mow May). Goldfinches are enjoying the seedpods left in the flower borders (recently Knautia macedonica) as well as the daisies (Leucanthemum superbum) in front of the conservatory window in Winter. Throughout the garden you’ll also find quite a few bits of dead wood which is left to provide for the insects that need dead wood at some stage in their life cycles.
A mosaic of habitats is essential for biodiversity
6. Upcycled pallet bench
It needs another lick of paint, but this bench made out of free pallets and some really big screws is a great place to sit. As much as possible we try to reuse and use up material that otherwise would be thrown away. A broken pot can be made into a feature and the willow grown in this garden -the fedge between the meadow and the vegetable garden- is used for several plant support structures.
We try to avoid buying new plastic. 80% of all plastic produced is still in this world and plastic can only be downcycled.
We are reusing, upcycling and avoiding plastic.
7. Thyme seat
When you sit down, you’ll smell the scent of the crushed thyme from beneath your feet. This seat is in the edible perennial bit of our garden, much of which we’re still developing. Our foodsystem relies on annual crops. Although there are many perennial edible plants other than the obvious orchard fruits and Mediterranean herbs, perennial crops form only a small part of our diet and culture. This makes edible perennials not only difficult to source, but we also find that we are quite hesitant eating them. The ones you’ll find growing here are Jerusalem artichokes, several edible flowers, herbs, asparagus and sea kale and some orchard fruits.
This year we also created a small pond for water mint, water cress and duck potatoes (Sagittaria latifolia). Even if we aren’t brave enough to eat the duck potatoes, the water in the pond will help the wildlife in this garden. Britain has lost at least 400,000 ponds over the past century according to the Freshwater Habitats Trust. Birdbaths need regular cleaning and as such a pond is less work, as it’ll need mainly topping up.
Our ponds support biodiversity.
8. Lutyens Bench
With pear trees on either side and a native hedge behind it and on the right (when facing the bench) this seat should give the tired human a feeling of being embraced by trees and shrubs.
A good spot to talk about compost, right? Well, any spot in this garden would be good to talk about compost. The vast majority of “waste” this garden produces is used to make compost. “Waste” is put in brackets as organic matter isn’t actually waste. They are essential nutrients and the building blocks of a healthy garden.
The clay soil needs compost to make it both drain better and to hold on to water. The best place to store water is in the soil. We live in one of the dryest parts of the country with less than 60cm of rain a year. Current climate change predictions are that our Summers are going to be even drier (and our Winters possibly wetter). Compost also helps to create a healthy soil supporting all the soil microbes and animals, which in turn will support the plants. Check out our compost area behind the seat in the meadow and on your way out, feel free to lift the lid of our one green bin, to check that it is as good as empty.
The garden “waste” is composted to help feed the plants and hold on to water.
9. The late Summer seat
Our temperate and seasonal climate means that many (native) plants flower in the Spring and early Summer and by the end of the Summer they have completed their seasonal mission and as such look a bit tired. So hence this area is created to sit and enjoy some of the later flowering plants such as Asters, Japanese anemones, Liriope muscari (which fails to thrive, or do we just need to be a bit more patient?), several salvias and Chinese Plumbago (Ceratostigma Plumbaginoides).
It’s next to a bed of cut flowers. We grow our own cut flowers. In addition to the carbon footprint of transporting flowers across the globe, levels of pesticides used on cut flowers, certainly the ones grown outside the UK and EU are often high with reports of both workers abroad and florists here becoming ill. Also, our native flora is so rich that we really can do without roses in February.
We’re growing our own cut flowers.
10. Meadow seat
This seat is placed in such a way that you can only see nature. The pond is planted up with native plants and the meadow is scythed, starting in late June once the yellow rattle has finished flowering and has shed its seeds. Yellow rattle (Rhinanthus minor) is often called the called the “meadow maker”. Semi-parasitic, it targets grasses by stealing their nutrients and thus stops them from taking over the landscape and leaving space for other wild flowers. Unfortunately, due to the compacted clay that means also docks and bindweed. Hence we start mowing a little bit earlier than for example the meadows in Eddington, but still in line and in time with what created our meadows in the first place: the need for hay for Winter fodder. Although our meadow grass ends up on the compost heap, the idea is the same.
The UK has lost approximately 97% of its wildflower meadows since the interbellum. These meadows have existed for thousands of years and many species of pollinators, birds and small mammals developed in symbioses with the people-managed meadows. Needless to say that this has catastrophic biodiversity effects and even though our meadow is very small, we hope it helps.
The meadow is a habitat for various pollinators birds and small mammals