Creating a garden in Spain
This week we welcome Derek Lindley from La Drova, near Gandia for a series of articles based on his spectacular garden – as well tips on planting and growing, amongst other stories
THIS is a series of gardening articles with a difference, well that’s the plan! I would like to take the reader through my story so far, which starts in 2016 – well in Spain it does. I have been a keen gardener all my life, although I never had any formal training. Indeed, my only claim to anything remotely connected to gardening is coming top of my class in my first year at senior school, in what we euphemistically called the ‘gardening lesson’. But that only lasted for the first year, they must have thought I was intelligent and I moved up to the top form. They only taught ‘gardening’ to the lower classes! Wouldn’t happen today, I doubt they have anything like ‘gardening’ lessons.
All my skill, if indeed that is what it is, has come from gardening books, listening to the old boys on the allotment and trial and error. My preference has always been vegetable growing, I like flowers but you can’t really eat them, and I do like fresh veg.
Anyway, I am getting ahead of myself. My wife and I came to live in Spain in August, 2016. We had looked for a house in the village where we had been holidaying for 15 years and we could not really find one we liked. So, in the end, through a friend, we found some land and a local builder and in early 2015 we commissioned the builder and had a house built. One of the prerequisites was that I wanted a vegetable plot, not massive but enough to keep me occupied and one where I could try and recreate an English vegetable garden similar to the allotment I had in the UK.
To give you some idea of what it looked like in the beginning and what it looks like now I will start with a few pictures. The first one (left) is in the beginning. As I watched the JCB level out the top soil I was still thinking, as you must be, this guy is bonkers. It is too hot in Spain it will be back breaking; he must be mad. When this first picture was taken, I was thinking do I really want to do this, have I the time to start from scratch.
Even my allotments had a shape and previous owners who had made an attempt at cultivation. Anyway, you are half right. It was back-breaking and hard work but, as it turned out after nearly five years of hard work and many lessons learned I did create a vegetable garden as you can see from the picture above, taken in late 2019.
As I mentioned at the beginning, I have no real love of flowers, my passion is growing vegetables. But I thought, why not create a lawned area with flowers so that is what I set out to do at the side of the house which I thought would lend itself to this sort of development. So, this was to be the start of my plan to create a lawn and borders with flowers.
The two pictures below are of my lawned area and my flower garden. The first as it was in the beginning, and what part of it looked like in early summer last year.
Over the coming weeks I want to share with you how I progressed from these first pictures to the way my garden has developed over the last five years.
I will be taking you through the problems I had, and how I overcame them. Also, some of the hilarious things that happened as I learned about gardening in Spain. I will also share some hints and tips for growing not only vegetables, but how I developed my lawns and flower garden.
More from Derek in two weeks’ time
AFTER a long period of selfimposed confinement, the four walls finally got the better of me, and I decided to take a look at the Vistabella fields, one early February morning.
The sun was just breaking up the early mist as I crossed Santa Pola salinas, and I paused to watch a slender-billed gull feeding, then checked out the usual huddle of spoonbill way out across the still water. Meadow pipits fed in ‘salicornia’ nearby.
I carried on and took to the ‘palm farm track’ – usually a dead cert for a few raptors.
A lone buzzard was perched on a shed roof, and many white wagtails fed in dry fields. When I got in amongst the tall reeds, the birdlife increased, and several chaffinches drank from a puddle.
Much more interesting was a big flock of tree sparrows that flew off and perched on reeds, but were soon dispersed when two quartering
Marsh harriers arrived on the scene. A dark phase booted eagle circled above.
I took the road back toward the edge of El Hondo where cranes have recently been seen – nothing.
So then I decided to park up and take a walk along the ‘Convenio’ – the fenced-off road that leads back towards San Felipe Neri, alongside the reeds of El Hondo.
I was hoping to hear the first songs of the resident moustached warbler. No such luck, but I had scarcely gone a hundred metres when a sound stopped me in my tracks!
It was the unmistakable ‘boom’ of a bittern.
If you haven’t heard it, it sounds like someone blowing hard into a big empty bottle.
The chances of seeing the author of the ‘boom’ were very slight, I knew, as the bittern is highly secretive, but I heard repeats at least twice
more, and it was my first record of the enigmatic bird for perhaps twenty years.
Perhaps a little more common further north, bitterns are nowhere very numerous in Spain.
I saw my first at Leighton Moss, North Lancashire, many years ago, then became much more familiar with the bird when I was ‘exiled’ to
Kent from my native Yorkshire – Stodmarsh was a very good place to give you a glimpse of one flying over the reeds.
My sightings in Spain, however, have been limited to one chance view of a bird quite close to the site of my ‘booming’ male, about twenty years ago, and one I saw on a visit to the Ebro Delta.