Background...

We bought the house from a church in April 1999, and we live in Uttlesford (NW Essex, UK). The garden had been ignored for probably 40 years (we found self sown trees and counted 40 rings). The garden slopes up from the house by about 4m over about 45m and is 15m wide. Uphill is West, the left hand side is South.

We both grew up a distrust of "gardening". Thomas liked mowing but nothing else. But the overgrown garden needed serious attention. We spent 6 months hacking away and spraying with Roundup, finding the contours of the garden and sketching up a basic plan. There was so much ivy and other rubbish that when we got in a digger to turn the garden in to our plan of three terraces we lost an awful lot of topsoil. As we have learned, we have found that this fact, the clay/flint soil we have make for continual challenges that we are generally too lazy to attack.

The garden:

From Surprised Gar...