Guest Garden for July

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This month's guest garden belongs to my son-in-law, Len . What Len wants in a garden is a place where he can potter, chill out and be creative. When he moved to the Midlands, 'that are sodden and unkind,' from luscious Devon, Len found himself landed with a garden sloping around the side and back of his house. Coarse grass covered rock hard clay and the low hawthorn boundary hedge did little to protect the garden from strong winds. An area near the two entrances into the house contained a decaying shed and the world's ugliest oil tank. The one advantage was that the slope did face west although a large part of it lay in the shadow of the house. decided early on that he would not undertake a massive digging operation involving months of strenuous labour that would tie the garden to a permanent structure. He wanted to experiment with shapes, colours and water features so instead of digging down he built up, "drystone wall" fashion, using broken slabs and pond liner, taking advantage of the slope to produce a running stream effect and a pond with a small fountain . He has dismantled and moved this structure several times over the past few years as he develops the garden and the children's fast growing menagerie. This is the stream in its current incarnation. Some plants are in containers, others have been planted in the crevices between the broken slabs and many, like the bulrush, have just grown themselves.   As for the rest of the plantings, at first he made small beds for shallow rooted flowers and vegetables by clearing rectangles of grass and spreading compost from spent growbags over the surface. Later, when the miniature horse arrived, he spread fresh stable manure over a larger area and left it to rot in situ before digging it in the following spring.