It was hard leaving my previous garden. Twenty-six years of loving toil had created – in my eyes at least – a beautiful garden: dry-stone walls, wisteria clad pergola, shrub and herbaceous borders and mature trees. This sounds pretentious, and it was nowhere near as perfect as that seems. But each plant, each stone, each path had been placed by me, tended by me and – often – repositioned by me. The violet‑blue of purple sage against the lime‑green Lady’s Mantle; bewitching primroses and bluebells; the blue‑green leaves and delightful pink flowers of rosa rubrifolia, would I be lucky enough to have such a wonderful garden again?
It was surrounded by ‘woods and trees and fields’ (as my story‑telling to my young sons always began). It was heavily shaded by mature oaks – spent flowers in the spring, carpets of acorns and never-ending leaves in the autumn. Surrounded by heathland, the soil was pure sand – easy to work, loved by ants, but poor and with no ability to hold water. A quarter of an acre crammed with the plants that thrived in those conditions – many of which spread around the garden without my aid, just needing to be contained or redirected.
I loved this garden. It was my passion. I treasured the tiniest of flowers, I adored the contrasting foliage and cherished seeing the garden from different viewpoints: I created different paths and placed many seats to give different perspectives, places to sit and absorb the sights, the smells, the sounds. Not that I was good at sitting in the garden – a faded bloom to be deadheaded, a caterpillar to be removed, a weed to be pulled, flowers to be gathered – always something caught my eye. And I was constantly redesigning, changing, developing – that to my mind is both the challenge and the joy of gardening.
How could I leave this all behind?
The decision finally made and with plans already emerging for our new garden, I decided that I would not take any plants from the garden – at least that was our resolution, until we decided we just could not leave our red Japanese acer (acer palmatum atropurpureum dissectum), which we had brought in a pot from our first garden and now it had matured into a splendid shrub. It had been with us for so long, how could we not take it? So it was early May, precisely the wrong time, that we severed its roots and persuaded the removers to load it onto the lorry for the journey north.
Leaving our garden in the spring, when it was at its most exuberant, bursting with colour and promise, was both exhilarating and heart‑rending. But my work here was done. Now it was time for a new and greater challenge – to build a Shropshire garden.