A new project

Of all the questions I get asked, there are two that come back again and again. Firstly, how to have flowers all year. To answer that, download my calendar and follow my jobs, and you will be 90% of the way there.

The second question is how to get started.

It is always easier to show than to tell, but I have long lost the original photos from the flower field. However, I now have a whole new bit of garden, a really quite soggy lawn if truth be told, and with someone else’s polytunnel on the south side, so it doesn’t even get the benefit of the aspect. However, it is land, and it is mine.

Between now and the end of the summer, I am going to document and detail every step of its transformation from this dreadful monoculture, to a garden full of flowers, bees, birds, and food. It will eventually be kitchen garden, but in this first year, which the soil settles and I get to grips with its character and its likes and dislikes, I am going to put in some annual flowers.

Oh ok, you got me. I just sowed way too many sweet peas to fit around the rest of the farm.

The very first step is a very gentle start which is seeing what you have.  For this garden, this mean:

• Mowing to get the grass right down (it was very overgrown)

• Pulling the worst of the brambles out of the hedge to see what shape they were in

• Digging out a hazel that was in the middle of the garden, and digging out endless suckers of honeysuckle that were choking the beech hedge on my side, and generally taking over

This has left me with an almost rectangle (nothing at Malus Farm is ever quite straight) and so now is the time to document it. When I get this featured in House & Garden in a few years time, it would be lovely to have really good ‘before’ pictures.

Also, pictures show shapes and sightlines, features that dominate or diminish, and they are better for considering scale than the human eye. This sycamore tree for example, is a weed that just grew up too close to a cousin. Although it is by far the nicer of the two (the right hand one is at the end of a neighbour’s patch) they do look rather odd next to each other and I am wondering whether taking it out would a) improve the light and b) allow this part of the garden to connect better to the rest of the farm. I haven’t mentioned this too much I hope, but I’d love to put the duck house there.

Ok, now I’ve got some pictures, it is time to start doing the thinking. Between now and the next post, I’ll be:

• Dreaming

• Wondering what purpose I want to put the garden to [read my views here]

• Drawing out outlines of the shape of the garden and making a million copies so I can sketch on them mindlessly and creatively

• Going on Pinterest. My thoughts here.

Oh, and collecting cardboard.

Join me for the next instalment of ‘Starting all over again’ next month