Leading You Up My Garden Path

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Our cottage is built into a fieldside bank. The garden is broad (as wide as the house), but not deep. Or rather it is deep since it drops off about 8 feet to the right of the frame. The two old privies back onto Townsend Meadow. There’s a very free-form hedge of many plant species behind the foreground flower bed, and a fenced portion (guerrilla garden on the field side) beyond the privies. The deep red smoke bush behind the brolly marks the boundary with next door, and I’m standing with my back against the bespoke, self-built Graham-Shed to take the photo. Here then is the Farrell domain – small and irregularly formed. An upstairs-downstairs-between-floors-short-on-planning sort of a garden.

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Square Perspective #18 A seafood teaser from Becky today.

Six Word Saturday  And a fabulous Vatican shot from Debbie.

64 thoughts on “Leading You Up My Garden Path”

  1. Looks a lovely space, Tish, despite your description of “an upstairs-downstairs-between-floors-short-on-planning sort of a garden.”

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    1. Hi, Sangeetha. Thank you. That’s a very fitting comment for the present times. The garden has definitely been keeping us happy. And sane (though some might query this) 🙂

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  4. What a delightful space – it is what I imagined your place sorta looked like from snippets over the years – the variety of plants and stone and layers
    –
    I like the opened door vibe – like you were inviting us right in even more

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    1. Much of it is due to letting some of the plants do as they please. E.g. The daisies in the final pic are wild but they have decided to colonize the garden, including outside the back door.

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      1. I love daisy flowers but the ones I planted,last year, came on strong this year. 4 ft. tall. Never knew they could get that tall.

  9. It certainly IS absolutely beautiful – more of a ‘quintessential English Garden’ than a ‘messy English Garden’ – such a haven. Both plants, hard landscaping and your wonderful building are a real delight. Aren’t those lucky enough to have outside spaces blessed.
    Thank you for inviting us into yours, Tish!
    E 🙂

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      1. Thanks, bishop’s weed has won the fight as I spend my time parenting, but now our child is 11, I’m amping up the gardening time. Hope you visit my site for a few garden photos. Cheers, R

  21. Fantastic. It must be a lot of work to maintain such a pretty garden. The walls of your cottage are identical to the walls of our house in Normandy. Walls used to be covered with some sort of plaster, but my mother had the plaster torn away and all the joints filled with cement. Much nicer. Your house must be old?

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    1. Hello, Brian. The cottage was possibly built around 1830 (from local limestone) so not old by Wenlock’s standards: some of the town’s cottages date from 14th century. All-over plaster on stone walls can make an awful lot of damp, so maman did the right thing. Lime render is best for the joints though, because it ‘breathes’. Modern cement used in pointing can cause a lot of problems too – trapping damp. As for the garden, I only do one really big tidying up session a year, in the autumn-winter, and a bit of tidying here and there during the summer as plants finish flowering. Otherwise, it seems to take care of itself.

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      1. 14th century? Not surprising. The church in our old village was a Gothic affair dating back to the 14th century. Those places, yours and “mine” have been settled for 2,000 years.
        We didn’t know about lime render then. Wish we had. But then the cement joint was really thin. The walls were made of 80cms wide stones. With very old mortar. So the humidity was in check.
        I can imagine the 2 major garden “maintenance” sessions. I guess a good garden is one that takes care of itself? A testimony to the gardener’s ability.

  28. It’s Centranthus, Mitch, and also comes in pink or white shades. It’s also called valerian, though it isn’t actually valerian, which is all very confusing. It is a wild plant and likes to seed itself in our limestone walls.

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  29. THANKS A MILLION TISH! AS SOON AS I SAW THE NAME I KNEW I HAD THAT IN ONE OF MY GARDENS DECADES AGO. THE FLOWERS LOOKED SO FAMILIAR BUT COULD NO SEEM TO THINK OF WHAT IT WAS. I TOTALLY UNDERSTAND THE CONFUSION ON THE NAMES 🙂

    Reply

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