If you are keen to know how to create a productive and beautiful garden - all while having a small canine ‘helper’ - Mark is here to help!
Before donning your gardening attire and rolling up your sleeves, I urge you to sit and look at your garden. March is a busy time with new shoots appearing daily, weeds starting to grow and so many things to do. Yet, sitting back and assessing your garden, highlighting what needs to be fixed, perhaps noticing or remembering gaps in the border, or simply referring to your annual note book to see what worked and what didn’t, is an essential part of good gardening practice.
When we moved to our new property in north Lincolnshire in 2022 the garden was a completely blank canvas. I knew I needed an area for filming for the BBC (an area we now call the ‘TV garden’) as well as a garden to relax in. And as well as this, at the beginning of 2023 a new bundle of joy came into our lives, Dude, a miniature, wire-haired dachshund with a lot of personality and ‘freedom to roam’ the garden. I’ll be honest, the main area of the garden which is to the rear and to the side of the property has only had a 40 metre hornbeam hedge added down one side, with metal lawn edging, between us and a large grain store that’s still in use, thankfully. I chose hornbeam as the autumn/winter biscuit-coloured leaves will match the colour of the ash wooden façades of the house (a former duck house).
To the front of the house, we’ve a large driveway, for which I’ve plans, and a narrow strip of garden to one side which has become the ‘TV garden’, where I’ve erected a greenhouse, a garden potting shed, water butts and two long borders filled with ornamental grasses, herbaceous perennials and espaliered fruit trees. Because the property used to be a farm complex, concrete has been used under the gravel areas. I intend to remove some of the concrete to plant ornamental trees and drought-tolerant planting. This will eat into our budget, so the gravel driveway plan will have to wait.
Due to budgetary restraints, we’ve left the lawn down the centre of the two borders at the front, but we’ve plans to remove the turf and install either self-binding gravel or resin-bonded gravel, so water can still penetrate the soil below. This area gets sun all day, hence the positioning of the greenhouse in this area. The greenhouse and shed sit on loose gravel, with the proper ring beams below so they don’t move. In time, this will also be replaced with the same pathway material for a seamless feel.
