This was my first garden, where for seven years I pottered about obsessively.
It is a very exposed cottage surrounded by farmland, so I started by planting mixed native hedges – which are now three times my height and ready to be laid.
I grew vegetables, cut flowers, created a wild flower meadow, compulsively read gardening books and magazines, whilst studying (I completed the RHS General certificate, City and Guilds Diploma in Garden Design and two courses with the Horticultural Correspondence college) and working full time as a gardener. First as “trainee gardener” in a team of five on a private forty acre estate and then in private gardens when I became self employed in 2000.
During the same time I was helping to renovate the farmhouse and feeding two farmers – I felt like Mrs Beeton in my early twenties.
There was a nursery on the neighbouring farm, belonging to two elderly brothers. I would have loved to continue their nursery, which sadly closed soon after I met them. Their meadows were a favourite place for my dog and I to walk. They had never applied any fertiliser and only cut them for hay once a year, so they were filled with wildflowers and orchids.
The meadows are under new ownership now, so hopefully the wildflowers will not be lost.
