A family playground
When Louisa and Tony Dawson moved to Fife’s beautiful Kirklands House, they found joy in gifting their children glorious green space in which to roam, they tell Antoinette Galbraith
Two years ago Jacob Dawson was given a go-kart for his eleventh birthday. While this is one of the items his grandmother Gill Hart might prefer he didn’t leave lying around the garden, the go-kart did at least have an unexpected benefit. ‘Jacob saved up his money and bought a trailer to attach behind the go-kart,’ explains his mother Louisa. ‘He now uses it for moving things like gravel, compost and grass cuttings around the garden.’
Nor is this the only contribution from the next generation. Jacob’s younger brother, nine-yearold Cameron, recently produced the best crop of strawberries ever seen at Kirklands, the Georgian family home in Fife.
The rise of multi-generational living is well documented but three generations living, working together and sharing a garden remains unusual. Three years ago Louisa and Tony Dawson, then living in Wiltshire, took the decision to move in with her parents, Gill and Peter Hart. Their decision was prompted by the desire to replicate the idyllic childhood Louisa and her brother Mark had experienced.
‘The garden was a big part of the decision,’ Louisa explains. ‘In Wiltshire we lived in a new house in a new development; the garden was reasonable by modern standards, but space was tight,’ Louisa explains. ‘As a child I loved having the space to run around in and I wanted that for my boys.’
At Kirklands, where Peter and Gill had spent forty years restoring the two-acre garden, there were flowers, vegetables and fruit trees. There were also lawns to play on, paths for bicycles and go-karts, trees to climb and woods to explore. Thankfully, their decision received an enthusiastic welcome. Gill and Peter, who were starting to think about downsizing, viewed the move as an exciting opportunity which also held out the prospect of help in the future.
‘As part of the plan to lure them back we began adapting the garden to a new purpose,’ Peter says, adding that while a pallet nailed up a tree or a giant cardboard box was sufficient a generation ago this
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We began adapting the garden to a new purpose
time things were different. A rope swing, zip-wire and campfire site with a fire pit surrounded by a circle of tree stumps to sit on were added. Space was found for the hot tub that came north from Wiltshire, and the pizza oven was installed on the terrace at the side of the house. An ‘all-singing, all-dancing’ tree house was built over a number of years, eventually expanding from a first tree to a second.
The tempo of the project escalated when the entire family went into the woods with a chainsaw to build Cameron’s birthday present. ‘We cut down a few ash trees and carried them back to the garden to make a climbing frame,’ Louisa says. ‘It now has a trapeze, monkey bars and a tyre ladder, and after lockdown eased we added a climbing wall.’
Louisa’s brother Mark, plus his wife Claire and their three children – six-year-old Beatrice, five-year-old Celia and two-year-old Wilbur – visit from Oxfordshire to join in the fun.
The garden has become an important part of Peter and Louisa’s working day. They work from home running i-comment360, a business providing questionnaires and company surveys, and after getting most of their work out of the way in the mornings they spend their afternoons in the garden, where WiFi reaches the treehouse.
A keen cook and baker, Louisa heads to the lower garden where she grows vegetables, taking full advantage of the polytunnel which her parents built twenty years ago. ‘Historically I was not overly interested in gardening,’ she laughs, ‘but now I am interested in the environmental side of things.’ Meanwhile Tony enjoys the garden peacefully. He ‘likes to find a quiet place to read, sometimes up in the tree house’.
Keen to share their knowledge outside the confines of their immediate family, Peter and Gill last year recruited Jo Archer, a WRAGS (Work & Retrain As A Gardener Scheme) trainee, to work alongside them once a week. Jo, who
The pizza oven was installed on the terrace at the side of the house
is always accompanied by her spaniel Banba, worked in a solicitors’ office before deciding to retrain as a gardener, and now runs her own landscape business. ‘Jo worked with us until the lockdown started,’ Peter explains. ‘It was great to see her enthusiasm for working outside in all weathers and to pass on some of our knowledge acquired over the last fifty years.’
With Jo unable to work at Kirklands since lockdown, the help provided by the Dawsons’ two young children has been even more useful as they prepare for the winter open day when, besides ‘thousands and thousands of snowdrops’, the garden is bright with pools of yellow aconites, purple pulmonaria, hepatica, erythronium and iris. Pink, deep red and creamy hellebores, many raised from seed, are a winter highlight of the scheme. Early flowering cherries and rhododendron will be in flower. Further into the garden you will find witch hazel, Callicarpa, scarlet berried cotoneasters, holly and fragrant Winter Box.