The Hills Are Alive...

I was just mulling over gardens, as I noticed that our copy of Lance Hattatt's book "Gardening in a Small Space" was off the bookshelf. Whilst our garden definitely doesn't answer to that description anymore; when we bought the book, we were living down the High Street at our previous house, which most definitely did. I can't remember the exact dimensions, but it was small, even by the standard of my growing-up house in Winson Green: the entire building plot of which, from the pavement out front, to the end of the garden out back, was eleven feet wide by fifty-seven feet long, the bulk of which was backyard and garden, split by the common access across the backs of the terraces that made up our row.

Lance Hattatt included in his example gardens section of his book, a garden writer's town garden, measuring seventy by thirty feet in dimension, which would have equalled the combined gardens of our entire row in Winson Street: actually, this was originally the case - the 'gardens' were a continuous, shared plot when I was small, only later divided up by the occupants of the houses in the row. I don't know for sure, but I would guess the original concept of the plot was for growing vegetables for the residents' own consumption: something I really ought to research - when that terrace of houses was built, I know for certain that they were surrounded by farmland, as they were the first to be built in the street.

At the High Street house, I planted one of the smallest lawns ever, at shy of two metres square, and the entire garden occupied little more area than ten square metres. Here, our house sits in a quarter of a sloping acre, which presents its own unique challenges; but at the back of our house is a different scale of project altogether (pictured). The sloping one acre field behind us is owned by a conservationist who lives in the house to the right of the mountain gate leading onto Y Ffridd: his house being opposite to the one lived in by Brenda Chamberlain (blog posts passim). As you can see, he's in the process of terracing the top of the field to extend his gardens - a process involving some manpower and machinery. It's looking good thus far and I trust he'll plant judiciously to mitigate the run-off from the mountains during the rainier bits of the year: we'll see as the year progresses.