Welcome to HOME & HORT, where I’m showing you the creation of a new garden design stage by stage in our English walled barn garden. Work hopefully starts on the barn itself come autumn, when I’ll be sharing all my best renovation tips, as well as realtime updates of the build. Come and join our merry gang from 88 countries around the world and 49 U.S states. Here you get the details that you’ll never see on Instagram and you’ll be the first to see everything, not just the snippets.
Happy weekend everyone. It is way too hot to be reading long emails this week, so I’ve created two little videos for you, which will explain the whole garden design and show you how I did the rusty Corten lawn edging, started the paths with old stone edging and lifted copious amounts of turf to create the flower beds. The first 30 seconds or so of the main video is silent, but then I explain everything.
None of this has been seen on Instagram yet, I’ve always promised that you would see everything here first and the detail will only ever be here. Get ready as very soon I’ll be showing the first two beds dug over and enriched with well-rotted horse manure, and one of them is now planted. I’m so excited to show you all I could burst!
If you’d like to read about the recurring dream I keep having, which is the inspiration for this garden design, then click here.
If you would like to know how to create an oval lawn, along with a few of my planting ideas, then click here.
Gazebo news! It arrives on Tuesday and will very soon be built. There’s a little more info and a picture of my last one, which was very similar, here. Then I can get painting it and can plant up the bed that had all the boulders in it. There’s no way I’m planting up so close to where tradesmen will be, you know plants are invisible to them, so a little more patience needed there.
On that note: a few people have asked why I am planting up the garden at all before the renovation work starts. Well, I have done this many, many times, as I’m sure you know. We are not extending the barn. The scaffolding will sit on the raised area by the house and away from the garden and borders.
I’m not planting up the area closest to the barn at all. There will be a good 12-15 foot gap between a cordoned off garden and the raised area and scaffold for building detritus, storage and general mess. When I say cordoned off, I really mean it. An actual fence of some kind will prevent builders from entering and ruining my hard work. It’s worked before.
The other reason I nearly always start the garden first is that I like to give it lots of time to establish, so that by the time the build is over, the garden will look like it’s been there forever. The garden should never ever be an afterthought.
A second video is behind the paywall, plus the rest of the first video. I also explain my use of materials and how I intend to create a cohesive look.
