Apr
Things seem to happen quite slowly here, but we get there in the end…
We were planting up a new area of the garden last week and I realised that it was the culmination of some three years’ work. The bank in the photo was once (back in the 1980’s, when Potager was a garden centre selling mostly conifers and camelias) the spot where all the rubbish was dumped; plastic, concrete, old batteries.
It all started with an apparently unrelated job, when we cut down some conifers (old nursery stock, now 30′ tall) at the top of the bank to let more evening light into the area outside the café. Unfortunately the light also benefitted the bracken and brambles that had been growing quietly on the bank below and they flourished. A couple of years of careful weeding soon got them under control, but as we started to think about planting it seemed a shame not to retain the bottom of the bank with a stone wall to match adjacent areas. A trip to the Jonas Brothers quarry near Wadebridge confirmed that their stone was the same as that used some 15 years ago for the other walls. A borrowed mini digger allowed us to re-grade the bank, pulling a lot of rubbish out of it as we went, and dig footings for the new wall. Over the course of last summer, our team of Friday volunteers taught themselves dry stone walling and did an excellent job of persuading 14 tons of random stone to match the existing (professionally built) walls.
And so last Friday, following a trip to Old Withy Nursery, we planted up the bank and are looking forward to moving on to other new projects in the garden…