Much as I enjoy visiting gardens, I do not particularly enjoy gardening nor have any talent for it. My job is just to mow the grass, when needed.

Steph, on the other hand, became a keen gardener when we returned to the UK in March 1981 after more than eight years in South and Central America; we were married in Peru in October 1973.  We bought a house in the northeast Worcestershire town of Bromsgrove, about 13 miles south of Birmingham city center, convenient for my daily commute into the city where I had landed a lectureship at the University of Birmingham.

---

Built around 1975, our newly-acquired house didn’t have much of a laid-out garden. With lawns on the front of the house and at the rear, there were some meager flower beds around the edges, a lean-to greenhouse (cobbled together by the original owners from redundant wooden patio doors), and a five year old weeping willow tree that we decided to get rid of before it became too large or its roots ran riot, causing damage to neighboring properties, and even ours in the long term.

In autumn 1982, we replaced the willow with a Himalayan birch, Betula utilis var. jacquemontii.

We’d done our research and felt that this jacquemontii birch was the ideal tree for our garden. It wasn’t expected to grow too tall. I went to our local Webb’s garden center to collect it, and it was small enough to fit in the passenger foot-well of my 1981 Ford Escort.

By January 2017, however, we’d decided it was no longer fit for purpose in our garden. Despite several attempts to keep it in check over the years with professional pruning, it simply had grown too tall, was shading a considerable part of the garden, and besides that, sucking up lots of moisture and stressing all the plants roundabouts. This was how it looked in October 2010.

So we called in the tree surgeon and had it felled. Always a sad thing to do, but it was the right decision for this garden.

In 1983 we’d finally demolished the lean-to greenhouse, and erected a small 8 x 6 foot Hall’s aluminium frame replacement which Steph used to raise seedlings and some vegetables like tomatoes. We also had the patio remodeled and a rockery and small fishpond added.

Throughout the 1980s, the garden came along nicely. But then, in July 1991, we headed to the Philippines for the next 19 years, and the garden had to more or less look after itself, until we returned in April 2010 when I retired. During the intervening years we’d had someone come by during the summer months to mow the grass, front and back. But apart from that, there was virtually no maintenance for 10-11 months of the year, apart from the few weeks we spent on home leave each summer. Then Steph would be busy getting things back into shape.

Since 2010, the garden flourished, with beds of colorful perennials such as columbines and foxgloves among my favorites. This is how the garden looked in 2016.

And in these videos, you can appreciate how much pleasure the garden gave us over the years.

---

However, in 2020 it was time to move on. We’d already made a decision in November 2019 to move to Newcastle upon Tyne in the northeast of England, to be closer to our younger daughter Philippa and her family. We put our house on the market in January 2020 and waited for the offers to roll in.

Then the pandemic hit, and we braced ourselves for a long delay. Luck was on our side, however, and there was one family keen to purchase No. 4. The sale finally went through on 30 September last year, and the evening before we took a sentimental walk around the garden, wine glasses in hand. Click on the image below to open a photo album.

---

We rented a house for the first six months, but just a week after we arrived in Newcastle, we found the house we went on to buy, on the northeast side of the city, and just 10 minutes by car from the North Sea coast!

To say that the front and back gardens were unimaginative would be an understatement. Both were just patches of lawn, about 11 x 10 m at the rear of the house, and maybe 4 x 3 on the front.

Before leaving Bromsgrove, Steph had collected seeds from most of her favorite plants, or taken cuttings. So we brought them in half a dozen crates full of small pots, and carefully nurtured them through our first northeast winter.

Then it was time to repack them into the crates to our new home, where they remained on the patio and alongside the fence until we had decided how we wanted to transform our garden space.

Steph took time to finalize her plan for the rear garden. I drew up this version that we sent to potential garden landscapers. All we wanted them to do was remove the excess turf, and bring in some top soil as we’d discovered that beneath the lawn was a pretty heavy clay soil.

We accepted one of the tenders by mid-April, and Steph began to layout the design using one of the garden hoses, then sticks.

The landscapers spent almost three days at the end of April to remove the turf, dig out the path across the lawn, and add the gravel bed around the shed.

Then it was time for Steph to begin planting, which was not so easy given the heavy soil.

And so, where are we today? Making progress. I guess this first year it’s an opportunity to discover which plants thrive or survive the winter. We have lots of different plants, and no doubt we’ll increase those that do well. Nasturtiums (grown from seed) are already showing great promise, although some have been heavily predated by black-fly. Verbena bonariensis, dahlias, cone flowers (Echinacia varieties), and a host of others are showing promise such as first year biennials like foxgloves, while lilies, succulents and other delicates are thriving in pots. We have also to decide what to do with one part of the garden, close to the house that does flood after heavy rain.

So, mid-August, we do feel that we have the makings of a nice garden, which will hopefully go from strength to strength. We still have to decide on a tree to plant, although we’re currently tending towards a crab apple variety.

It’s hard not to reflect on what we left behind in Bromsgrove. But I have to keep telling myself that what we had enjoyed there was the fruition of almost 40 years tender loving care. It will take a year or so before our new borders show something of equivalent brilliance. It will nevertheless be worth the wait.

---