Garden of the week
This colourful plot gave its owner ‘the chance to do his own thing’
If memorable gardens carry the stamp of their owners, Twin Tarns in Cambridgeshire deserves to be unforgettable. The oneacre wildlife garden situated on the Fenland uplands was born out of inventiveness and a desire to recycle, with a dollop of scepticism for anything so easy as popping to the shops.
Mike Robinson moved to this plot on the edge of Somersham village in the autumn of 2002. His wife Frances was unable to join him from Oxford until the following summer, so rather than immediately looking for work, Mike decided to use the interim time to sort out their new house and garden.
Apart from four shrubs and a ‘non-pond’, the whole site was almost blank. “The back half had been divided into two horse paddocks,” explains Mike, “while along a brick wall bordering the property there were two dozen elder trees growing out of its base, ready to push it over!”
It was precisely the type of place they had been looking for. “It gave us a chance to do our own thing without working around someone else’s ideas,” Mike adds.
In the far corner was an eightfoot-deep ornamental pond, dug by the previous owner who had also planted young trees along
its edge. “The bad news was that it only ever got half full,” says Mike. “The good news is that with a ready supply of moisture, the trees now look like they’ve been there for 40 or 50 years. They’ve helped give the garden maturity, so we’re lucky from that aspect.”
From these sparse beginnings the garden’s design grew with guidance from the site itself. Where the previous owner had mucked out the stables, there was an enormous pile of horse manure. “I knew the soil was going to be rich,” says Mike. “I didn’t want to move a ton of horse manure, so that became the kitchen garden. It was also a little closer to the house and had a nice brick wall for espalier fruit trees. It made sense.”
Raised beds and gravel paths add structure to this space, while grapes trained along fencing gave the garden a sense of enclosure. South of the kitchen garden runs the long border, a handsome brick wall making it the obvious site for deep herbaceous planting. The border’s generous depth means there’s room for broad sweeps of perennials such as echinops, fennel, crocosmia and daylilies, backed by a tapestry of climbers. In contrast to this colourful border is the box maze, all 800 of its plants grown from cuttings taken by Mike. “For the first three years I was derided by everyone,” he laughed. “I don’t like paying for things and I’ve always been self-sufficient, so I’d rather wait!” The box cuttings came from a single shaggy plant and were rooted in gritty compost in individual pots in the greenhouse. “I did the outer circle
the first year, and the next year I hadha more cuttings to do the inner, and made
concentric circles. I then used a paper plan and cut out little bits until I worked out what I thought was the most complicated maze I could get for the size of it.”
Box blight is mercifully absent and Mike is understandably keen for it to stay this way. “We formed a gardening club in the village and there are plant swaps two or three times a year, but I always say ‘no one bring box!’”
At the maze’s centre is a dragonfly, one of several sculptures dotted around the garden that have been woven by Mike out of willow. An old hay barn has become a summer house, and the stables were turned into a micro-brewery – with a display of woodenhandled tools on one wall once belonging to his father-in-law.
This year will be the eighth time they’ve opened for the National Gardens Scheme, and the garden continues to evolve. Many of the original vines surrounding the kitchen garden have been removed, with the increased space providing room for two Victorian greenhouses.
The biggest task in April is weeding, with Mike reckoning one hour’s weeding at this time of year will save three or four hours in the summer. A bark chipping mulch is spread over the borders and this also seems to keep slug and snail numbers down.
The garden is run organically and Mike and Frances were keen to add water for its wildlife value. Their solution was to dig out 120 tonnes of soil, mounding it to one side and adding a further 30 tons of Derbyshire limestone to create a rockery. After seeing the price of stone at a builder’s merchants, Mike chose to hire a lorry and source the stone directly from the quarry.
Now there are two ponds, the lower with a waterfall, while the upper is still and has a central island made by an ingenious decision to fill a fibreglass pond liner with soil and plant it with yellow flag iris and other aquatics. The ducks love this development, using it as a safe nesting site every year.
Meanwhile, the original ‘non-pond’ has morphed into a fernery, with plants thriving in