4. The Garden Plan

Walled Garden plan - first 4 Phases

It is not often that you get the opportunity to create a garden space from scratch, starting with a completely blank sheet, or in this case a derelict site. My previous experience has been of gardening in small Central London town gardens: paved courtyards with high walls and everything planted in pots. It is an exciting prospect having so much more space to work with.

The main objective is to create a lovely studio space surrounded by a kitchen garden and orchard, and to make a real feature of the surrounding garden walls.

The studio will be made of timber construction; a low energy, kit-built building with extensive glazing. It will be built along the south-west side of the site, immediately adjacent to an existing neighbour’s property. This will provide good quality north / north east light to the studio. Revised planning permission is needed for the building, so it will be the last phase to be done. In the meantime, I will do what I can to get the rest of the garden framework in place, tackling it in three phases.

Phase 1 works will establish the kitchen garden. The growing space will be made up entirely of raised beds and pots, with the site and direction of them chosen to optimise the amount of sun / shade available for the different crops. I will go into a more detail on the preparation, build and planting of the kitchen garden in future blogs.

Phase 2 will establish the planting along the boundary walls: cordon and fan trained fruit trees, ornamental cherry trees and a row of silver birch trees. It will also include a camellia and holly hedge; the camellia to hide a neighbour’s unsightly wood fence, the holly as a refuge for birds and a deterrent to visiting cats coming over that wall.

Phase 3 will be to establish a protected growing space for fruit trees and a collection of South African and Australian protea plants. The fruit trees are young and will be grown in large pots until the studio building work is completed. Until then, they will need protection from the birds. The protea collection need very specific growing conditions and protection in the winter months.

Phase 4 will (hopefully) be the studio build project. At that point we need to be able screen off all the parts of the garden already established, or be able to move it, for the duration of the building works. The kit build is expected to take approximately 12 weeks. Once that is done, I will be able to start on detailed design of the central section of the garden.

I will go into more detail about the works for each phase as it happens. Timing is hard to predict: it is dependant on free time, resources, the weather in the North West (!) and the demands of the day job. But it is such a great project to have, and am really looking forward to getting on with it.