Garden: Five Years On

This week we celebrated the fifth anniversary of our arrival in the Hautes Pyrénées and for a bit of fun I thought I'd take a look at a series of photos of the garden from over the last five years, to see how much the place has grown and developed.  

Week One.  The plot is a south facing slope - looking up from the house.  The topsoil has been entirely stripped off and in some areas it took three years for any vegetation to recolonise.  Importing soil and sowing grass seed was prohibitively expensive.

I was prompted by watching a gardening programme on TV where a couple had turned their three and a half acres into a magnificent and varied series of gardens in just five years. Mature trees and hedges divided the spaces into distinct rooms; courtyards, paved areas and stone walls contrasted with the enormous wildlife pool that doubled up as a summer swimming pond. It just goes to show what can be achieved with determination, skill, hard work and a lot of cash. 

We have three quarters of an acre, and we too started with just a field but five years on we still largely have a field with a now fertile potager.  We weren't afraid of the hard work and certainly had the time and determination, and I like to think that we have some of the skill as well, but with only a few hundred Euro to throw at a project each year, it was always going to be a slow process.  

We put in raspberries and fruit bushes, and five tiny fruit trees in the first year, all we could afford, and harvested our first fruit from the trees in 2014.  

The raspberry trench, cut from blue clay subsoil and filled with a blend of horse manure and clay.  

2011 saw the purchase of three more fruit trees, but the focus was on planting up our new pergola with a mermaid rose, a grape vine, a kiwi and two tender shrubs that promptly succumbed to a week below zero that winter.  A terrible waste!

2012 the big expenditure was on a ginkgo biloba and half a dozen hedging plants. photinias, a couple of buddleia, nothing very extravagant.  I was reluctant to spend much after the losses during the winter.  Luckily, we are surrounded by forest which regenerates given the chance.  This hedge runs along the length of one boundary, and is now six feet tall, amd it is entirely the result of simply not cutting right up to the boundary.  The hedge is made up of blackthorn, beech, field maple, dog roses, ash, cornus mas and a few things I've not yet identified!  It had its first cut in 2014.

Building a Pond

Any serious wildlife gardener has to have a pond.  And anyway, where better to sit and take stock, look at the view, watch the dragonflies, and have a beer?

Our plot slopes, so we wanted to site the pond near the top of the hill, where the mountain views are least obscured.  When the house was built, a large drainage ditch was dug across the plot to take water away from the construction site.  As this naturally fills with water in wet weather, and is an already partially dug hole, it seemed like the obvious place to choose.

Although we are on very heavy clay, we decided to line the pond with an artificial liner, anyway.  We weren't quite sure how long a traditional clay-lined pond would last with the temperatures in the 30s and low 40s and no rain to keep the clay moist and water resistant!

The drainage ditch running east-west across the plot.

Developing a Glow Worm Colony

Followers of this Blog will know that we have a lot of slugs.  An awful lot of slugs.  And snails, although as these are regularly collected, purged and eaten they are perhaps less of a pest!  We are tyring to make the garden as attractive as possible to any slug munchers out there.