05 Feb Chapter Seven – Developing a Garden at “The Berkshires” – Turning a paddock into a garden
Continuing on with the story (from last November’s issue – to catch up you can read the last blog post here)
Once the sloping bank at the rear of the house was planted, I set my sights on deciding what to do with the areas behind this section of garden. This is the very back of the garden. The area was sloping up all the way to the back fence. The soil was compacted heavy clay and has like the rest of the garden had been a paddock for many years. It was full of terrible weeds, totally uneven with diverts and mounds everywhere. Whilst the best idea would have been to try and sort out the weeds, level the ground and spread an even ground cover such as Kikuyu over the ground, I was too keen to get trees planted and growing. I did have a master plan for the total area so having this plan allowed me to do the landscaping in a different order than what I would normally recommend. We had decided to create a park like feel in this area with a central axis continuing on from the top of the stairs. This central axis was to be paved/pebbled with a circular bed at its centre. This bed would be the location for our tractor wheel sculpture that we had constructed from the iron wheels we found around the farm. The line of the pathway was to be highlighted with Capitals Pears. From the top of the pathway we had two arcs of trees radiating out in a curved line. The trees were planted so that there is always a pathway/access way between them for vehicles to drive up from the driveway of the house to the back boundary of the garden. I did this so if we ever did have a grass fire there would be access to all sections of the garden. This curve of trees also directs visitors around the back section of the garden. We have planted out 65 trees in this rear section. The planting palette was a mix of hardy species such as Ash, Crab Apple, Koelreuteria, Albizia. Eventually these trees will have gardens planted out around them.
Once these trees were in and growing I then made plans to sort out the ground coverage for the space. It was hard to decide as this was in the middle of the drought and we really weren’t sure if we could afford to allocate any water to this area. It was left a for a few years whilst we just focused on watering the trees. Then in November 2020 we had a bore installed and there was a prediction for some wet weather in the long term forecast. It was now or never! We had to have all the area seeded before the heat of summer otherwise we would miss our chance of finally getting an even uniform ground coverage throughout this area. We got started on spraying out all the terrible paddock weeds, scrapping back the mounds, filling in the holes and then spreading, cultivating and levelling out the 2000 square metres of ground. We brought in 46 cubic metres of organic topsoil and compost to give the seed the best possible growing conditions. We then seeded the total area with Kikuyu grass. Now two years on the Kikuyu is going strong and you can walk around this area without the risk of spraining an ankle. Stay tuned for next month when I reveal the next stage in our garden plan that we are still to construct.
