New look for new development

After

Before

In February 2006 my husband Joe and I moved from Wiltshire to a new house on a small development in the 'black and white' village of Weobley (pronounced 'Webley') in West Herefordshire. The site originally housed an old steam mill which has been converted to apartments.

The garden, which turned out to be bigger than we had thought once the undergrowth had been cleared away, was a sea of mud with a bank sloping up to a field and the site of the old castle. There were plenty of stones, including some that had obviously come from the castle, and plenty of rubbish. We had to take a hacksaw to an old bucket that had a tree growing through it! Our grandchildren had a lovely time with a metal detector unearthing 'treasures' which were mostly nuts and bolts and pieces of tractor! Some of these we later put to use as the pedestal for a sundial.

As we had an open and green outlook we decided against the lawn at the back of the house. No longer being in our prime, we had help to dig and edge the beds and lay the gravel. Everything else has been our own work, including building a rockery on the bank and, most recently, making a small solar water feature in the bed in front of the conservatory. We planted hundreds of bulbs during the autumn, and they repaid all our efforts when they created so much colour for us last spring. They didn't all come up but as we had a mole, wood mice and several squirrels visiting the garden, we were not really surprised.

We hope that the flower garden will need less care once the perennial plants have filled out and that our pots and planting in the gravel will eventually soften the lines of the log roll and paths.

The veg plot was experimental last year and I shall be more selective from now on. However, we enjoyed salad crops, tomatoes, courgettes, beans, carrots, cabbages and strawberries not to mention a bumper crop of damsons from a very ancient hedgerow tree. Our bird feeders encourage a variety of woodland, field and garden varieties. They also attract wood pigeons and squirrels but this is a small price to pay for living in such a beautiful place.
Pat Millington, Weobley