Project Description
The front gardens of The Old Laundry have always sat in the metaphorical if not literal shadows of the main side garden and the back gardens stretching up the 1:5 hill our cottage has clung to for over 400 years. Aside from a patch of grass, the defining feature was a dense, impenetrable thicket of brambles along with a blanket of weeds that had run rampant for years.
The first task was to cut back as much of the brambles as possible, a feat not helped by the short, steep bank that falls away from a top lawn to the bottom lawn. This then gave us physical room to appreciate the profusion of weed, mostly ground elder, that had taken up residence years ago. It also surprisingly revealed some hidden shrubs and flowers, most noticeably some delightful hellebores.
Next began the challenge of doing a first pass at digging out as many of the bramble roots as we could physically reach, a task not helped by many of them being entwined with the roots of the established hazels and forsythia which we wanted to keep. Needless to say the ground elder was also well and truly mixed up in all of this. In the process of this we discovered a large raised bed we didn’t know existed as well as finding out we had a fence between ourselves and the neighbours. This was repeated many times over the seasons until we had eventually liberated the main bank of brambles and weeds.
Fast forward a year and we began to sensitively begin the process of replanting the main bed, drawing on our knowledge of what flowers and shrubs would thrive in our soil and very localised micro-climate. As with most things there was an element of trial and error involved but we quickly fine-tuned our understanding of how to continue adding to the richness and colour of the garden and how to best extend this across the seasons. And the result is so much more than we could have hoped for.
