My first garden was a tiny triangle of sooty earth outside the kitchen window of my student flat in Vauxhall,south west London, in 1973. I planted six tulip bulbs which had been a free offer from Nescafe coffee and I was so impressed when the flowers unfolded, that I decided I liked to do more of this gardening lark.

I had to wait another 5 years before I had the opportunity to try my hand at gardening again, this time in my first house, in North Yorkshire. It came in the form of a small patch of lawn surrounded by brambles, hawthorn and blackthorn which formed the perimeter hedge, along the Cleveland Way. I tried my utmost to get it all under control but the arrival of two young children and the demands of a part time job left me with very little time or energy to implement my ideas.However,thanks to a copy of the Readers Digest Encyclopeadia of Garden Plants and Flowers and a weekly dose of Geoff Hamilton on BBC`s Gardeners World, I became much better prepared to tackle my next project.

In July 1987 we moved 100 yards to this house.The garden consisted of a thin layer of topsoil seeded with grass,which covered the foundations of 4 rows of back-to-back miners houses, which had previously stood on this site. I had been presented with a blank canvas on which to create my very own garden.

How the garden evolved

Back