Garden Beginnings

We had not done much to the garden (yard, to Americans) yet in 2019. When we got the house, we recognized that being at the base of retaining walls could give us difficulties. We had to live here for a couple of years, a couple of full rounds of seasons, to get a sense of what the property needed.

Front

In front, we created a small flower bed just outside the bay window and planted a few blueberry bushes. The flower bed contains a variety of bulbs that mature at different times. We sometimes add a few small annuals, but even without annuals, something is blooming there from late February until the end of the growing season.

Full maturity will take years and our ground is wetter than the bushes would prefer, but the blueberry bushes should eventually be about 5 feet tall. At two spots, we couldn’t keep blueberry bushes alive. We gave up on the spot to the side of the bay window where we tried to grow a dwarf blueberry bush. The other spot is now occupied by a hydrangea. More about that later.

Whenever wildflowers bloom in the front lawn, we postpone mowing to let the bees and butterflies have more time with them. I used to battle the weeds in front, but the front lawn wants to be more wild plants and moss than grass. Now I only pull out types of weeds that would crowd out everything else if I left them.

We’ve been rewarded by the sudden appearance of two wild orchid plants of a variety that used to be common, but has become scarce. They are in a strip by neighbors’ driveway. They are notorious for dying if transplanted. By mutual consent, we mow the strip when we mow our lawn until prime season for the orchids, when it becomes a wildflower strip, and then we resume mowing near the end of the season.

We didn’t do much more in front until summer 2022 when we put in five dwarf fruit trees, carefully located to avoid water or drainage pipes that crisscross the ground under our property.

Back, Our Main Problem Area

The back door from the utility room and French doors at the dining room open onto a concrete slab patio and a commanding view of a brick retaining wall. The neighbors on one side of us are several feet above us. The entire row of houses behind us is far above us.

Britain is famously damp, especially in winter. We don’t get four inches of rain per hour like southeast Texas can, but we do get a lot of rainy days. We’re adjacent to Wales, which is wetter than England. From my home office, I can watch weather sweep down to us from the Welsh hills.

All the rain from the neighbors above us comes down through our property on its way to what used to be a stream until the water company put the stream in an underground pipe on the other side of the street. Our back lawn sloped up significantly from the patio and then more gradually to the tallest retaining wall.

We converted a seating area covered with slate chips into a wildflower bed, set up a small strawberry planter, put up a small vertical herb garden (a gift from a friend) and put balcony boxes along the top of the fence as an experiment. When the pandemic arrived, that’s all we had done.

The “before” photos here are the best it could look. A year later we got dry weather, the clay dried out completely and much of the grass died.

Realizing the Scope of Our Issues

Early 2019 was an especially wet winter. We had adopted a big dog who came to us with an undisclosed intractable giardia infection (and, we later learned, a terminal mass growing in her belly). Getting giardia under control took three rounds of treatment. Until then, she needed to go out a lot. We needed to go out to clean up after her.

That’s when we realized our soil was more clay than anything else. My photos look okay, but in the winter the back became one big slippery slope of wet clay, getting packed down by so much foot traffic. Water stood almost half an inch deep on much of the back lawn, except for the most noticeably sloped strip. (When I took the photos here, it had dried and was nearly as hard as the concrete patio.) The side became a mushy swamp. One night the mud sucked a shoe off my wife’s foot and she slid down to the patio on just a sock.

We had to do something about the back garden.

Clever Solutions Sometimes Need Outside Expertise

We asked gardening expert Sue, who lives across the street and downslope a little, for ideas. We wanted not to have a clay mess. We wanted better drainage. We wanted a garden friendly to wildlife. We wanted to be able to do a little gardening without depriving the dogs of too much play space.

We aren’t experts at gardening or landscaping. Much of the gardening I did in Texas doesn’t translate well here, where the climate is cooler and the wildlife is different. My wife grew up with a lovely garden that was flat with good soil and no major trouble handling runoff. We needed help from someone who knew more than we did.

Sue trudged around our mud in her wellies (Wellington boots), pacing off distances. A few days later, she didn’t simply tell us an idea or two. She gave us a booklet presenting her ideas, complete with watercolor, sketches, detailed descriptions of each element, and costings of primary materials for the largest elements.

Although we’ve taken a different approach to some smaller elements, we adopted the heart of her proposal. As I mentioned, we were awaiting proposals to hire the main work done when the first lockdown began, so we decided to do it ourselves.

If we had known how hard it would be, we would have looked for some other way to achieve a similar concept. It probably wouldn’t measure up to what we have now.

Gabion Wall as the Centerpiece

Sue recommended expanding the width of the patio by one more row of slabs, then installing a gabion wall six meters long, a meter tall and at least half a meter thick as the heart of the design. A gabion wall is a metal basket filled with rocks. We could make the portion of the garden behind it approximately level and the wall would hold it so that it didn’t slide down onto the patio.

Leveling the back garden required adding good soil and manure to the clay, which would help drainage. The gabion wall and the trench of slate chips it rested in would collect runoff and channel it to a hidden French drain. That’s an underground pipe perforated to let water in. We could tie it in with the storm sewer system, encouraging some of the water flowing through our property to take a shortcut.

The gabion wall would also be an immense home for small creatures, especially insects, and more interesting than a meter-high brick retaining wall.

Validation of the Decision to Do Something

We could keep a buddleia that grows adjacent to the retaining wall to the side of us. The bees and butterflies love it. (We have to prune it severely every year or two.)

But before we could do anything else, we had to move the two huge hydrangeas where the patio met the retaining wall on one side, near the buddleia. Hydrangeas are toxic for dogs, so they didn’t belong in the back with our dogs, anyway. I dug them up and moved them to the front.

They kept falling over. Each time, I would find the dirt around their roots had washed away. I drove stakes into the ground to anchor them, packed in more dirt… and one of them began to hold its place, but the other continued to fall over. I pulled it out to see what was happening and discovered I could see the water flowing across the hole. It was like looking at a stream in miniature.

That hydrangea didn’t survive despite all my efforts to establish it. After the back garden project, my wife established a new small hydrangea at the spot where blueberry bushes repeatedly die. She has ambitions for a border of hydrangeas inside that property line on one side of our front lawn, although so far we still only have two planted out. She’s nurturing more from cuttings.

Such a vivid look at how much water was flowing through our property confirmed the decision that we had to do something drastic enough to bring ground water under better control.

Next time I’ll show you what we started during the first pandemic lockdown. After that I might post about something else from time to time to give you a break. Not everyone wants an uninterrupted string of posts about a garden makeover!

(Photos by Bonnie D. Huval, copyright 2019)