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.