The Greenhouse

Once the word was out that I was after a greenhouse, I was fairly swiftly offered an enormous 12' x 8' one with loads of accessories etc. (including 2 water butts and an irrigation system) for a tiny amount of money on the basis that I dismantled it.

The only problem was that I couldn't put it up in my garden yet as a) the space for it wasn't ready and b) I didn't want giant sycamores being felled crashing onto it!

A good friend kindly offered to let me store it at her house until next spring when I'll be ready to erect it.

It took a day and a half to dismantle and transport it but well worth the £40 I paid I think!!

Meantime, I've come to the conclusion that I don't need or want a 12' x 8' one. A friend has an 8' x 8' and that seems a perfect size to me, plus it will fit into a perfect slot on the boundary between the Top and Bottom Gardens, so I'll trim it down to fit. That will also mean that I don't need to replace the one missing pane of glass and also I'll have a few left over for spares or to make a couple of cold frames if I need them. Win/win!

The Giant Sycamores

 aka The Elephants in the Garden?

My god, these things dominate. They are totally out of control. Nothing else stands a chance. It's like War of the Worlds down there. 

I hate them and they have to go.

Well, that's not strictly true. I love the amount of firewood that they are going to give me. And I'm not going to kill them - just cut them back to ground level. The likelihood is that they will then grow several new stalks each and research (i.e. Google) seems to suggest that each stalk will be arm thickness after 3 or 4 years. So I figure that, with some careful management and regular coppicing, they could provide a fairly regular source of firewood.

This is the small one.

And this is the big bugger.

They don't look so bad once the leaves have fallen - trust me on this, they are thugs!

This tree felling lark creates chaos once the trunks start to fall, so I was keen to do as much as I could and get it processed onto the wood pile out of the way before the big guns arrive at the weekend. I started off by getting rid of as many of the smaller lower branches off as I could, but I kind of got carried away and surprised myself as to what I could achieve with my cheap electric chainsaw actually. 

I got the easy 4 trunks of the smaller tree down (i.e. the ones that were likely to easily fall in the right direction as I shouted "timber"!) Deeply satisfying work and another few weeks of firewood on the pile 😀

A very long and intense winter's day, with 2 chainsaws going for most of it, saw all of the sycamore trunks taken down, with just a few heavy trunks left to chop off at ground level once there's a bit more room to process wood. But I can do that with my electric chainsaw.

The garden looked like a hurricane had hit it! There was SO much wood to process on the ground to keep safe places to fell into.

The next reasonable day saw me out there trying to make sense of the mayhem. I think the size of the log pile has doubled! Most importantly, I needed to clear space to be able to burn off all of the smaller branches (ideally I would have chipped this, but the chipper/shredder I hired last time is out of action.)

A 4 hour fire, which was still very hot 24 hours later, saw it all got rid of and a lot more timber cut and stacked but there is probably another day's work to process the remaining wood and cut down the sycamore stumps to their lowest level.

The Three Hollies

This is the first post written "in real time! All the previous ones have been catching up the story so far!

When all of the clearing of the Bottom Garden has been done, there will mainly be three holly trees left in the corners. 

Each of them is/was a similar height to this photo below - around 25 feet.

Each has already had some pruning work done to varying degrees. The one above (top left on the plan) had a number of lower branches removed to let some light through into the Bottom Garden in late afternoon. The remaining form is not particularly attractive.

The one at the very bottom corner of the garden was more in the form of a giant bush and the bottom 9 foot or so was removed to clear space below, generating about another 12 feet of garden in the corner. The remaining form is tall for a holly, overgrown and straggly in parts.

And the third one in the top right of the garden behind the new shed has already been cut back fairly dramatically in height last year.

There was actually a fourth one, adjacent to the top left, which was in the way of where I am (or, more accurately, was!) intending to build steps down the garden. That was chopped down and dug out earlier in the year. Golly gosh it was a difficult blighter 🤨

The tree behind the shed that was cut right back last year has grown back fantastically and is showing really strong and healthy new growth. I've come to the realisation that the other tree at the top needs the same treatment, so this will be cut back to around 8 or 9 feet, which should generate a more tree like form that I can prune out to keep uncrowded and healthy in future. It will also fit more into the scale of the replacement trees that I'm planning on planting  in future. The tree in the bottom corner needs some work cutting out remaining dead and straggly parts, but should be able to retain a lot of the height on the boundary, which helps to blend with adjacent neighbours' trees there.

"Before" looking up the Bottom Garden.

"After"

View from bedroom after

Incidentally, the three hollies are forming the skeleton of the new Bottom Garden and have given the house the name Bwthyn Celyn, or Holly Cottage, as recognition of this.

Clearing the Bottom Garden

It's felt quite odd clearing the bottom garden - a definite case of being "cruel to be kind", as I want to keep a natural feel down there but also want to be able to make use of it. So every time I'm pulling plants out (mostly ivy!) or chopping down a tree, I have to remind myself that I will ultimately be putting a lot more back, but it will be in more of a manageable form and scale. My plan is to reinstate the special magic of the garden over the next few years.

But really I needed to engage in some pretty wholesale clearance before we could start building back. My plan was to spend as much time as I could during 2024 and 2025 to clear and then be ready to start re-establishing things in Spring 2026. 

I wanted to be able to use some of the space at the bottom of the garden to store and process garden waste, so needed a way to get down there relatively safely. I cleared a space along the edge of the garden and used various bits of rubble and blockwork to make some fairly precarious steps. It wasn't pretty (or particularly safe to be honest!) but was a lot better than sliding down the hill.

The flat part at the bottom was covered in ivy which buried a couple of abandoned armchairs that had rotted and were in a hundred pieces, mixed in with rusty scrap metal and loads of glass. That was a real labour of love to clear a safe space down there and involved several trips to the tip. I bought an incinerator, which was regularly fired up to burn off piles of ivy.

I was aware from the very early visits that there was some sort of raised planter structure in this area, but hadn't been able to really see what it was or how big it was because of being so overwhelmed by ivy. You can just make it out here beyond the green builders bag.

When I eventually cleared it, it turned out to be an old masonry greenhouse base and was big - 11' x 8' - with planting beds around the outside. A hawthorn and a sycamore (of course) had seeded in there and were well established!

What an ideal foundation for a summer house and almost the perfect size and location. So the plans have been redrawn (in my head) around that. Over time, I dug the beds out, which turned out to be very deep luscious topsoil and moved it up onto the hill, where it will eventually go into the raised planting beds, then knocked down the central brick walls and backfilled it with all of the rubble I generated over the first 18 months or so. It turned out to be just the right size!! Boy, was that a hard day's work, smashing up all of the bricks and rocks into small pieces for hardcore.

Gradually, the slope was cleared of vegetation and smoothed out to make it safer and ready for next year's work.

I was generating large amounts of wood, with all of the clearing and general tree-fellery that was going on and needed somewhere to season it. The boundary walls at the bottom of the garden were fairly rough so I decided I would stack all the wood in front of them to improve the view!

First there was the matter of one of the big holly trees, which was actually behaving like a 25 foot tall bush! I cut all of the lower branches back up to about 9 feet above ground and found another 15 feet of garden in the corner!

A few weeks later, Rob was over for the weekend to give a hand and he did a great job clearing all the ground back to the walls. This became known as Rob's Corner of course.

And, finally, I had somewhere to start to organise the various piles of wood. I think it took three days of chainsawing to get it all sorted!

I'm changing the entrance to the Bottom Garden from the side to the centre. So I did a bit of work organising that and creating a flat area at the top of the Bottom Garden, which will ultimately have a small garden shed on and be the "landing" to make your way down steps.

I created a 1 foot change in levels which will mean I cut 2 steps back into the Top Garden. Every bit of level change I could achieve helped! Unhelpfully, there was an old gnarly privet in the way, so I spent a sweaty few hours digging that out, and then used an old scaffold plank to temporarily retain the soil.

I planted up some willow cuttings either side of the new opening and a former to train them into an arch over time.

And now it felt like we were starting to reconstruct at last! A big bag of stone; some slabs and some sleepers to form a retaining wall were laid to form a shed base. You can see the willow arch taking shape here as well.

Then I spent a lot of time fixing up and painting an old shed I got off Marketplace. It's ended up much more solid than buying a cheap new one.

The final big bit of clearing is the tree felling of the big blighters - the two almighty sycamores -  and I think some "heavy pruning" of the other two hollies. I'll cover this in a separate post.