Garden of the Week
One woman’s diligent work has transformed a windswept piece of grassland into a sheltered haven brimming with edibles and flflowers
Aneed to provide food prompted Shirley Gilbert, now aged 83, to start cultivating the plot surrounding her Norfolk home when she moved there in 1991. “I was on my own, making ends meet by doing a few gardening jobs, so I started clearing a space to grow fruit, vegetables and herbs,” she explains.
The garden around her traditional flint and red-tiled house – two former farmworkers’ cottages joined together – consisted mainly of grassland. Working alone, clearing the grass was a long, slow job for Shirley, and before the produce could be planted, she had to dig in copious amounts of home-made compost to enrich the sandy, limey soil – a job she continues to do each year.
Once the veg plot was up and running, Shirley’s next focus was providing shelter. “This area is flat and near the coast, so the north winds in particular are an absolute killer,” she says. She surrounded her boundary with native hedging, which has since grown up and obscured
the views, but it enabled Shirley to enjoy the garden in comfort and start planting in earnest.
She put up a shed, installed water butts and started compost heaps next to the vegetable plot, which she sectioned off as a ‘working area’ with a magnificent wooden trellis. Shirley clothed it with climbing roses, honeysuckle and pale pink Clematis montana, cleverly obscuring the whole working area from view.
Turning her attention to the ornamental part of her garden, Shirley’s first job was to add a small pond. “You simply must have water if you want to attract wildlife,” she says. Bit by bit she started cultivating sections of soil, again digging in barrow- loads of compost.
Despite the freedraining nature of her soil, Shirley was determined to make her garden drought-resistant. “I didn’t have time to keep watering, so apart from the plants in pots, in the greenhouse and cold frames and newly-planted specimens, my borders never receive any water except natural rainfall,” she says.
Shirley attributes her success to packing each cultivated section chock-full of
plants. Set out in a traditional cottage-garden style, her borders overflow with hundreds of spring bulbs before burgeoning self-seeders such as forget-me
nots, honesty and perennial wallflowers come to the fore.
Spreading hardy geraniums, variegated ground elder and foliage plants, including hostas and grasses, intermingle with the flowers, while shrubs provide structure. “It’s crammed and crowded with plants, which people love to see, and it means that the borders tend to look after themselves.”
In late summer, attention focuses on her impressive fruit
arch, which is stocked with
carefully trained and pruned apples, pears, cherries, quinces, crab apples and a vine.
Supplemented with a multitude of soft fruit bushes in her veg patch, Shirley is completely selfsufficient for fruit.
It took seven years of backbreaking work before Shirley felt ready to open her garden in 1998, which she continued to do for 16 years, but by the age of 76, “I found I couldn’t keep doing what I used to be able to do!” Before she closed her garden gate for good, Shirley was desperate to pass on the knowledge she’d gained, so she started holding practical classes. “Over four years, I took on eight students a year who got their hands and feet dirty working hands-on in my garden. It’s crucial to pass on what we’ve learned.”
Sadly the beautiful wooden trellis collapsed after being ravaged by Storm Doris and is now being rebuilt. “It should soon be back to its former glory and I’ll retrain the climbers to the new framework. Then my dogs Milly, Molly, Mandy and I should be cosy in our lovely garden again!”