Making Veddw part 4: what did we do next?

We got married

Anne Wareham

Feb 13, 2025

Today:

We have a wedding

Homemade clothes

Smelly sheep

Piles and piles of wood

Tipar (what is tipar??)

Making paths

Bird Baths

and Pergolas

Wedding!

A fun filled occasion at Newport Register Office.

We got the sheep back.

It was one way to keep the grass down. Hm. Did you know that a field full of sheep in close proximity are terribly pongy? And if you plant things, they will eat them. It was good while it lasted.

Well, that was the glam bit. Apart from that we spent hours and hours getting wood for the fire. The supposed ‘central heating’ was useless and necessitated regular trips to the dump with redundant radiators.

Charles became the hunter of fuel and then we spent much time, as one does with that stuff, cutting and stacking and then bringing in and — burning. Yep, we just **burn** it after all that. The pool was in what became part of the garden. Then got lost behind a hedge.

And we went on with the Front Garden. The Front Garden is on a flat piece of land in front of what was originally a 200 year old cottage. It is about the size of the cottage’s footprint and the land on either side slopes steadily. I think the platform was made from the spoil from levelling the land for the cottage. So it is an obvious shape and size, an echo of the cottage part of the house.

We began by making a rather horrible pergola, adding a bird bath which was given to us as a wedding present, and making paths. And sowing annuals, by the look of it.

That’s next door at the top of the picture. Overlooking us, of course, like everyone else. Was.

Grass was not very happy making. It gets soggy and slippery. It’s hard to mow round a bird bath, and I never even contemplated doing that edging thing. Some friends suggested we make paths using some stuff we came to know by the name of Tipar, which was the base material they stick carpet on to. To make carpet. We got a HUGE roll of it, which was all the carpet people would sell us, and they delivered it to the top road. I have no idea how we got it down to the garden, or indeed, how we persuaded them to sell us some and deliver it. But it squashed and killed the grass on the paths.

The gravel here was what we were blessed with when we arrived.

Then we wondered about the gravel to put on top of it. We visited loads of local quarries and all that was on offer was a miserable grey colour. We had an afternoon of total despair, then Charles found (how?? No idea) the right quarry. Right being one which was the colour of the old red sandstone, which is what the garden sits on. It is terracotta coloured. Huzzah!

I have to confess though that though this gravel looks nicely terracottarish when it’s wet, it’s a bit greyish when it’s dry.

The big trick with the gravel though is getting what is termed locally 25 to dust - the 25 being millimetres. It’s gravel that hasn’t been washed and has clay in with it. (Related to what is poshly called hoggin) You shovel it down, about 2 inches thick, rake it level and if you’re feeling ambitious, squash it or tamp it down. It will look unpromising. But when it rains the dusty bit, which is the clay, washes through and disappears from sight and after a few weeks it sets solid.

Initially it looks like this and is quite loose.

We have got this gravel on precipitous slopes and it stays. However, when we have a horribly wet year, as we just did, it grows moss in a desperate attempt to become a Japanese Moss Garden. Which is an absolute pain. It brings you back to the grass problem: slippery.

There are never perfect solutions to anything in gardening.

New path. Photograph taken by Charles on the roof. One red blob is me, faffing about.

The garden looks very cottagey here (not my favourite thing) but clearly it needed edging of some sort to separate it from the meadow, which looks as if it was in the process of being mowed. We planted a box hedge along that boundary, which we have just had to remove due to box blight. Sort of again - back to square one.

We also grew big blobs and a hornbeam tunnel:

A big blob. Charles thinks they are too big. And on the garage in the background a Kiftsgate Rose which is also rather big.

We’ve also been through a succession of bird baths. This is the Front Garden in May, with Euphorbia griffithii 'Fireglow or Dixter looking wonderful. I’m trying to get it to spread in the back two sections too. Variegated ground elder bottom front.

You can see the recently departed box hedge along the back, to either side of the Hornbeam Tunnel. I loved the wavy hedge at the front too, but that also got the blight and had to go. That story is here.

Charles made the Bird Bath, with a little help - see here, if you’d like to know how.

We replaced the rustic pergola. This is the danger of garden visiting - you see too many dead people’s gardens and if you’re not careful, you import dead ideas.

We grew a rose over the pergola, as you do. I discovered it’s hard to smell a rose which is on top of a pergola. This is 1990.

This is the replacement pergola. I decided I liked it empty (though a purple grape has found its way on the the far end). It serves the good function of closing off this end of the Front Garden.

So how was I doing with this garden making thing when we’d established the embryo Front Garden? Well, a friend brought her mother for tea. After they’d admired the Front Garden I discovered to my shock that they thought we’d now finished making the garden.

As if!

Charles

They say that a garden is never finished. I believe them. This is just a quick look at several manifestations of just one relatively small area of the garden and we’ve changed and adapted it so much over the years. We started with so little money to spare that the rustic pergola of freely collected wood was all we could afford. Soon the new one will need a rethink as it rots and is attacked by our local woodpeckers. I love Bird Bath #3 but the base is made of wood; its days are numbered. But so are ours and one day someone else will be making it over again. What’s the betting that the Cottage Garden will be revived?

Teaser for next time: