Garden of the Week
This Bristol garden combines colour and fragrance with its status as a sanctuary for some rare wildlife
Just four miles from Bristol’s busy city centre, Mark and Jane Glanville’s garden is a peaceful oasis packed full of colourful flowers, soft fruit, vegetables and an astonishing amount of wildlife. Dragonflies shimmer over the large, crystalclear pond near the house, which also attracts great-crested and smooth newts, frogs, toads and damselflies. Carefully designed nest boxes built by Mark and placed
For perfect plants at perfect prices go to www.gardennewsshop.co.uk around the eaves of his house mean that it's now home to the largest breeding colony of swifts in Bristol.
“We’ve designed the garden to look beautiful, to provide us with food and to be a haven for wildlife,” explains Mark.
When the couple moved in some 30 years ago, they inherited a huge lawn and a 'Newton Wonder' apple tree, a reminder of the fact that the house had been built in an orchard in 1929. The tree remains, but the rest of the garden is unrecognisable from those early days. Mark and Jane divided it into two sections, with a wildlife pond, flowers and formal borders near to the house, and a productive vegetable garden at the bottom of the plot.
“Shortly after we moved here in 1987, Jane came home from work one day to find a huge hole in the lawn. That was the start of the pond,” says Mark. He made a rockery using soil from the pond and some huge stones acquired through his job with the local water authority.
“When I was planting the marginals, I made a few mistakes; for example, the water lilies I had chosen were too big for the area. But now we have bogbean, water forget-menots, mimosa, which grows in the boggy areas, and dwarf pink lilies which suit the space much better.”
The wildlife hedge which surrounds the garden is a mixture of hawthorn, beech, holly, hornbeam and dog rose. This was an early addition. “We’ve never regretted planting it, not just for the wildlife it benefits; it also shelters the garden from wind and it’s an excellent sound barrier.”
Multi-tasking plants are a real feature of Jane and Mark’s garden. “Everything has to earn its right to be here. We want things to be attractive, but they should be wildlife and drought-friendly, too, as we’re on a hill and our sandy loam soil dries out quickly,” says Mark. Scent is another priority,
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and the garden includes jasmine, sweet peas, wisteria and roses for spring and summer, and winter honeysuckle, mahonia and Daphne bholua for fragrance in the colder months. “We’ve made little pockets of scent, planting by seating areas, in corners, and where you might walk past and brush by at any time of the year.” The vegetable garden features a series of raised beds which are full in every season. “We believe in successional planting so we never leave the garden bare. I have a list of 50 different things that we grow,” says Jane, who describes herself as the 'chief waterer and picker'. I also make things with everything that we raise, including cider from our apples.” Organic sprays are occasionally used to control pests, but otherwise Mark and Jane rely on CDs suspended from sticks to deter hungry birds from pecking their crops, combined with netting the laden fruit bushes. “Frogs and toads eat lots of slugs and snails, but we have also found that the wood preserver used to paint the raised beds deters them.”
Mark describes himself as an instinctive gardener who was working on his grandfather’s allotment from a very young age. “When I was 14, my dad signed me up for my own council plot. As well as growing, I loved watching the wildlife around me,