A few more recent piccies

Bottom section of garden from the east

Bottom section of garden from the west

Proposed site of new greenhouse in bottom section
(water and electricity supply already present)

Start of stepped path down to proposed greenhouse site

Fruit trees.

The garden is home to a considerable selection of fruit trees, mostly apples and pears. The pear trees are all to be found against the south facing wall on the far side of the summerhouse and some are in quite a sorry state, but have been pruned and winter washed and we'll see how they do this year - if they don't appear to be doing much, we may take some "pencils" and graft these onto rootstocks to see if we can retain the original stock varieties, There are 8 pear trees and most still have the original identifier labels mounted on the wall which also shows when they were planted. So in no particular order we have the following pears (with planting dates in brackets)
Doyenne du Comice x 2 (1960)
Didoneau (1959)
Pitmaston Rivers (1959)
Conference (1958)
Pitmaston Duchess (1960)
Beurre Superfin (1960)
William Bon Chretien (1958)
In addition there is a young pear tree planted just inside the entrance to the garden (variety unknown)
There are two cherry trees, both growing against the south facing wall in the herbaceous border. These are a variety called "Governor".
The west facing wall has a plum which is labelled "Joes Golden Drop" and dated 1959, but the tree that is there, although a plum tree, is definitely not the original that the label refers to as it is much too young.
There are 11 apple trees throughout the garden though as yet, none of the varieties have been identified.
In addition, labels have also been found for a peach tree and a nectarine tree, though sadly these no longer exist.

Update - the label that states the Pear variety as being Didoneau is more likely to be Durandeau.

Some progress piccies

Summerhouse and rose bed

Herbaceous borders after inital weeding

West facing border





Herbaceous borders from summerhouse



Here are a couple of older progress piccies - all the photos after this should be bigger and clearer - hopefully !



Welcome to this blog, which I shall endeavour to keep updating as time allows. The purpose of this blog is to follow the progress of the reclamation of a large walled garden which was abandoned for approximately 24 years and is now slowly being dragged back into some sort of shape, one day a week.
The garden sits on a south facing slope, and has a wall running the entire length of the south facing aspect and a wall running two thirds of the length of the east facing aspect. It currently consists of two herbaceous borders, both approx 4m deep by 40m long, which rum along the south facing wall, a raised oval rose bed in front of the old summerhouse, two small beds either side of the summerhouse, a fruit bed along the remainder of the south facing wall with pear trees, apple trees, blackcurrants, redcurrants and gooseberries, and another border / bed running down the east facing wall. The remainder of the garden is currently divided into a large middle section and a bottom section - both of which were completely overgrown and have now been cleared of the trees and scrub ready for phase two. To give you an idea of what the garden was like just after I started, here are some photos - I had lots more but due to a technical glitch, they seem to have disappeared !!



Looking towards the fruit bed from the rosebed




    



Herbaceous Border after initial clearance







Middle Section before clearance started





Rosebed and Summerhouse