The Joys Of Gardening

Posted By on 1st May 2015

At Ravendale House we built a garden from scratch. Not for the faint hearted, it was incredibly hard work, but also lots of fun.

Fast forward 17 years to ‘Grassy Bottom’, where we have taken over a well established garden created by the previous owner, Gladys, who was undoubtedly a keen gardener and accomplished plants woman.

You could be forgiven for thinking that taking over a mature garden would be a much easier task, but I fear not, although it is on a much smaller scale.

Large parts of the garden have been neglected in recent years, as Gladys became older and less able to keep up to it. One flower bed in particular is severely overgrown with weeds, in particular couch grass.

Clearing this bed would be hard work at the best of times, but there is an added problem. Within the jungle of weeds there are choice plants, shrubs and bulbs which we would like to save.

Consequently my preferred option of going in wielding my big garden fork is out of the question. I’ve made a start, but have a long way to go.

Needless to say whilst my back has been turned weeds in the other flower beds have been taking advantage of the situation.

At Ravendale House we were dogged by many weeds. Here too we have nettles, hairy bittercress and dandelions, we also have goosegrass, but fortunately, (I think I can safely say after 12 months) we have no ground elder.

This is a huge relief as it is a nightmare to control and almost impossible to irradiate in an established garden.

When we were preparing to move, before we knew where we would be living, I potted up lots of our favourite ‘Ravendale’ plants to bring with us.

Thanks to Gladys a lot of them were already here when we arrived, such as cowslips which, along with primroses, are happy to seed themselves everywhere, anemone japonica (not my photo) and Gladys’s magnificent collection of crocosmia ‘Lucifer’.

Nevertheless I still want to incorporate my plants into the garden, but the last thing I want to do is inadvertently introduce ground elder from one of my pots.

The desire to plant is great but the fear of ground elder is greater.

In the meantime I sowed some sunflower seeds I’d saved from 2011. This time they germinated beautifully, as you can see here. Ably assisted by Leonard of course.

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