Here is The Wild Garden with a clunky arrow showing you where you’d find it.

Sometimes the idea of clearing ground for planting is just too exhausting to contemplate. So this bit of rough pasture just got seed grown plants poked into it. With reference to this page from Graham Stuart Thomas’s Plants for Ground Cover :

I don’t think any of them are still there. But it was encouraging that someone as important as that regarded one of my strange ideas as worthy of consideration.

Hard work was, however, actually unavoidable and here it involved making the steps round it. And this time it was definitely me what done it.

But I do remember that steps are grim, for the amount of excess soil you have to cart around. (Where did it go??) And steps need fronts and something on their tops for walking on. (The familiar gravel in this case)

And then - you need edging so soil doesn’t undo all your hard work by dribbling or collapsing onto the steps. But how? Those lovely adverts for edging are all for flat, level ground, not roughly dug slopes. How do they get away with it?? How many of us garden on flat land?? With no bumps??

So I bought lots of roofing laths (battens) - which have a treatment against rot which lasts five minutes longer than untreated wood. And painstakingly sawed it up and painted it in random sizes, then bashed it into the sides of the steps, as you can see. Now dirty and somewhat wonky. Random helps disguise the unevenness of it all.

I get many brownie points for the idea and, indeed, the execution which was MEGA boring. But have to confess that Charles finds it very inadequate, and every year he gets to work on it, repairing and resetting and muttering muchly about why can’t we have Corten Steel. (What???!) So much for my worthiness. He hasn’t muttered yet this year, but he’s probably been distracted by 100001 other things.

You will see that at the top and back of this garden there are Magnolias, in the Magnolia Walk. They start with Magnolia Stellata , one of which was a wedding present and is bigger than the rest. We have evolved an ambition to have them all round the edge of the semi circle, so we have one huge, five medium and two tinies, all working towards that delectable goal.

The other magnolias are the biggies.

The Wild Garden is so called because of my planting into the existing grass. Strange that it almost sounds fashionable now, except, I guess, that would be the ReWild Garden. The year starts modestly with white daffodils which get fewer every year mixed with white Spanish bluebells (a safe distance from our natives in the Wood). The white bluebells are supposed to be rampageous, but like many of these promises they aren’t. Here anyway. But really, what we wait for is the Martagon Lily - just like the lily beetles wait for them too.

But we have a valiant squisher. So the Martagons thrive and spread.

But the glory of this garden comes much later in the year, when the flowering really gets going.

The basis of the display is at first rosebay willowherb, then followed by and sometimes overlapping with an unknown crocosmia, which was a gift from a friend overrun with it. Add in various ‘wild flowers’ that have always been there:

How effective it all is seems to depend on the weather - a wet summer last year led to a rather laid back result. The year before, visitors were raving about it.

Along the front we have some memorial stones, which are not of past pets. They memorialise local names. So:

I love the name Bulchey Bernard, which appears as the name for a nearby small settlement in a document dated 1687 and is probably a hybrid of English and Welsh - many of our local names are such combinations. By the 18th century the name had become Hatter’s Patch, which speaks for itself, I think. Currently it is called The Cot.

Ffymony Yearll is just such an English/Welsh hybrid as I mentioned above, and the origin is spelt out currently in English, as Earl’s Well. Ffynnon is Welsh for well - in this case, and often, an emerging spring. It is also local and clearly belonged to the Earl.

And then:

Perhaps my favourite. This is the small river which runs down from our valley to Tintern, currently called the Angiddy. And in 955 called Anghiti. With a rather sentimental version popping up in the 19th century.

That’s history.

Charles:

I think I chunner enough about stuff so I’ll let Anne off my complaints about having to replace a dozen or so of the edging pieces this year (again). I’d love a corten steel edge but working out the specification for it defeated me (and the cost would be horrendous).

The Wild Garden looks lush and dense but I still have to weed it of tree seedlings. Squishing Lily Beetle is very satisfying.(I’d not make a good Buddhist).