It didn’t look like this for long.
Charles insisted that we had to grow vegetables.
Good old Ruth Stout….. There are some embarrassing names in the USA (and in UK no doubt). Did you know that to trump is to fart in the UK?
So early on I mulched as above and I seem to remember stuck some runner bean seeds underneath the grass graves and grew some beans. I think. I did grow something.
But my heart wasn’t in it and one day, when Charles was away, I hatched a Plan. When he returned, I took him down to the entrance to the Veg Plot.
I solemnly presented him with a key and a copy of the Vegetable Expert.
Doesn’t look very used, does it?
And I told him I was donating the Veg Plot to him. And I took a photograph as evidence. We cannot find it. Which is very sad.
But it worked!!! Charles moved from being a garden assistant to becoming a proper gardener.
We then had to find a way to manage the garden design decisions between us. And eventually we agreed that in our agreed domains (which were then: me = everywhere but the Veg Plot. Charles =Veg Plot) we could and would consult with each other. But final design and planting decisions rested with the domain owner. (As in: me = everywhere but the Veg Plot. Charles =Veg Plot ) That worked well with only an occasional major issue. I recommend the system.
Charles then worked hard, not so much at gardening, but at the necessary preliminary construction. The paths were laid with Tipar, as before.
This was 1991, I believe, and Charles still happy to take his shirt off.
And I did my bit too…..
Seats are necessary everywhere, so a plinth was made for one in the Veg Plot.
You can see the Cotoneaster franchetii hedge behind the plinth, separating the Veg Plot from the Meadow and looking great before it got diseased.
The Plinth exemplified one example of a problem which recurred for us in our sloping garden. If you build things level on a slope, as we did here (above) the result is that it looks as if the thing is lurching out of the ground. I think your eye sees the slope as the level bit. We attempted to ameliorate this effect here by planting taller things in the right hand bed beside the plinth, and smaller things in the left. I think that today that has all become something of a muddle and we have stopped noticing the problem. Do our visitors? They don’t say so, but they are almost invariably too polite to comment.
This photo is almost contemporary and you possibly can’t see the problem. I think that having some planting in front of the offending feature helps perhaps most of all. But we will come back to this in a future post.
You can also see here the way Charles has edged the beds, with railings. Affordable. Rottable.
We had learnt that we would need compost bins, it being a Veg Plot. Charles found a plan in a magazine and made some, disguised as beehives for Monster Bees. They now contain very old compost and grass snakes.
This is the same view now. You can see there’s still a lot to tell you.
Now, at some point we visited Barnsley House, Rosemary Verey’s garden. Charles was much taken with the potager. Which is a fancy name for a veg garden made on very formal lines and designed to be attractive as well as functional. The paths at Barnsley House were far too narrow, so that you sort of tiptoed around, but we got the idea. Our Veg Plot got potaged. With fatter paths.
Here’s that view again:
It certainly is not like this now!
Brick paths were made (by Charles) between the beds. Each one with a different pattern. Which is much admired. (not) (shame)
And flowers grown as well as veggies. The standard Iceberg Roses suffered the usual fate – just to ruin the pattern, one got blown out of the ground.
But Clive Nichols was good enough to help. We used to ask for criticism and it was useful. We would ask ‘what would you change? And he said ‘get rid of the house’. He also pointed out that the colour of the roses was wrong. He was right – white can be a difficult colour in the garden. So they all went. And much anxiety went with them – standard roses are a pain in the neck. They blow over, apart from anything else.
And all this got a Bit Too Much. Charles had a demanding full time job and the Veg Plot, maintained to the standard he wanted got just too much. Something had to change.
And I’ll tell you about it next time. If you are nice and press the heart. Or restack!!
Charles
Anne handing over the veg garden to me was an act of genius on her part. At that moment, by necessity, I started becoming a gardener. In our garden visiting I’d been most drawn to formal gardens and symmetry, and the rectangular shape of the veg plot lent itself to transforming Annes veg beds into an ornamental and productive place. So I needed to engage with issues of design, but also, (since we were very much doing things ourselves) construction .
And then there were all those plants, both edible and pretty to plant and nurture and protect. I found it hugely pleasing when subsequently visitors would cite the veg garden as their favourite part. And it even got me into garden photography when Mark Bolton came to photograph the Veg Plot for The Kitchen Garden magazine and (unintentionally) encouraged me to use my camera more seriously.
If you love garden photographs you can see some of Charles’s here in GAP Photo library. And if you get this far, you can visit Veddw Garden as it is today – details here.
