The work

All the design work was done between my offer being accepted and completion in order that I could start work on the garden the moment I moved in. I owe a debt of gratitude to the vendors who let me visit many times in the interim to get more and more exact measurements.

Even though the house needed doing too, there is no separate access to the garden so all the heavy machinery like cement mixers had to come through the front door and kitchen. I knew I had to do the garden before the house interiors and anyway it was my primary concern.

So, before I could start planting I needed the hard landscaping, building work and wiring/lighting to be done.

After getting a number of quotes I invited a local company called Muddy Wellies to do the hard landscaping and the wiring. Work started in March 2003 and they had until the beginning of May to finish so I could get the planting in for the summer. They were a great team, made really useful recommendations on stone and fence suppliers, worked hard, used really friendly, experienced, mostly antipodean labourers, and completed pretty much everything on time and on budget.

The destruction begins	Creating terrace and walls and new fence	Lawn goes, bases for buildings and beds created

  Path made, Duckpaddle swing seat and cedar Malvern greenhouse go in

The cedar Malvern shed arrives, the pond stone and ‘Family’ sculpture go in

Then the wiring went in for the lights, greenhouse and shed.

After the Muddy Wellies team had left, a number of very good friends and I spent a couple of days deep digging each bed, extracting major stones and buried children’s toys and enriching the ground with compost and organic material.