Harry and I moved into this house with it’s 1/4 acre plot in 1990.  When we viewed it there was a walled, back garden full of vegetables, a small concrete patio area with a small greenhouse and a single garage.  There were several steps from the house to the garden but there was access for me with my wheelchair around the side.  The back garden faces south west and we get most of the sun over the left wall.  It backs onto a golf course where there are mature trees casting shade over the back area.

Once we had knocked down the single garage, put in a patio area and a conservatory, and made ramped access from the conservatory into the garden,  the garden is now an ‘L’ shaped garden.  Over the last 30 odd years we have changed various areas in the garden so here is just a few snapshots of the main area over the years.

The Raised bed

We built the raised bed in 1997 where it looks quite bare.  It is triangular in shape so theoretically I could reach most parts of it from my wheelchair.  It was very sunny back in the day but now gets a lot of shade.  One side still gets the sun, another side is shaded and dry, and the remaining side is shaded and moist.  Ferns love the shaded sides and the hardy geraniums love the sunnier side.  Aquilegias and spring bulbs do well too.

It has changed quite a bit over the years.

The Pond

We (Harry) made the pond in 1993 with just a pond liner and some old stones.  This is a wild life pond and has encouraged lots of wildlife with all sorts of insects, birds, amphibians and mammals.  The frogs love it.  It sprung a leak so we renewed the liner but later it just started looking tatty and leaked again so we got  Watergems  to build us a new, slightly larger one in 2014.  We now have newts along with the frogs and numerous pond snails.

The Stumpery

The area to the left of our L shaped garden used to be for vegetables and we moved the greenhouse from the right hand side of the garden to here.  The trees and shrubs belonging to the neighbours’ garden began to grow very large and cast shadow over that entire area.  So we gave the greenhouse away and completely changed that area in order to cope with the increasing amount of shade.  This is now more of a woodland area, that we like to call a stumpery.  We only have one stump but we were able to obtain some mossy logs from Gosford.