Gardening
A TRIUMPH ON THE BORDERS
As lords and masters of a demanding eight-acre garden, my partner and I were recently blessed with the supreme gift: the week-long, free services of a professional gardener. His enlightened employer had granted him a week’s sabbatical to work in another garden of his own choice to experience the trials and tribulations of a different site, different climate, different soil and different style.
Martin chose Bryan’s Ground, situated beside the River Lugg which forms the border near Presteigne between England and Wales, because he had once visited us on an open day and liked what he saw – or so he said. More likely, perhaps, he could see we were chronically understaffed and a five-day stint of young muscle wouldn’t go amiss.
I didn’t want to treat this valuable offering lightly. I didn’t want Martin to spend his days here slogging solo at a miscellany of humdrum and routine maintenance jobs. No – a proper and potentially rewarding project was needed.
Fortuitously, we had, earlier in the year, cleared a compost heap the size of an ancient burial mound and mapped out two new borders. Over the summer, they had been colonised by pernicious weeds, rogue buddleias and all manner of unwanted tree seedlings. We recalled, too, that the heap had been built on the foundations of a long-gone pigsty and donkey stable, leaving lightly interred old bricks, broken slabs of concrete and rusting ironwork. Could we transform this horror into a pair of smart mixed borders in the allotted time?
Martin was undaunted; excited even. I cleared my diary for the week, aiming to spend as much time as possible with him, hoping to clear, dig and plant the area in time for a topping-out ceremony at 4pm the following Friday.
If Martin’s brief was to learn from us, it’s fair to say we learned from him. His approach to my plan was remarkable. He was industrious but steady, working at a sensible pace which neither tired nor bored him. He carefully lifted chunks of broken masonry as if they were mummified corpses, wisely seeking help if their weight threatened to defeat him. Then he began to dig out the perennial weeds – burdock and hogweed mostly – combing the remains of each extraction to ensure no bits of root remained.
By midweek, we seemed to be on target. So much so that I proposed we took Thursday off to visit a couple of local gardens that I thought he’d enjoy. At Powis Castle, in a torrential downpour, we admired the late-season borders, asters, dahlias, sedums, heleniums and moyesii roses resplendent in their amphora-shaped, sealing-wax hips, autumn crocuses and numerous halfhardies, identifiable to me only by a system of discreet labelling. At a nearby nursery, I bought some ornamental grasses to feather the new planting scheme back home.
And then it was Friday, planting day. Hydrangeas were the mainstay of my vision – young plants I had propagated throughout the year from cuttings given by fellow collectors in the UK and France. Lacecaps in one border, mopheads in the other. And as Nature abhors a vacuum – bare earth – we set in place thuggish herbaceous geraniums, clumps of liriope and a sprinkling of the grasses bought the day before.
At 4pm: job done. We celebrated with mugs of steaming tea, Martin declining a glass of fizz as he had a 200-mile drive back home to Cornwall that evening. It was a week I’ll not forget in a hurry and, as proof of M’s endeavours, I’ve pledged a series of monthly photographs so that he can justly pride himself in a tiring but ultimately triumphant few days.