Beautiful - Practical - Personal

I often think that I grew up in a garden rather than a house. My large family lived in a 'retired' boarding school dormitory house in Reading with an acre of garden, at least half of which was orchard and soft fruit bushes.

My earliest memories are of being wheeled about (at a great speed!) in a wheelbarrow, picking blackberries from the huge hedge, topping and tailing gooseberries, swinging from the beautiful walnut tree and failing to grow wallflowers that I sowed in a bare patch of earth next to a wall.

There was a wild flower that I could dismantle to turn into a miniature parrot and set into an array on a grass stem.

When the family grew smaller and we moved to a small suburban house in Manchester, my mother still grew her roses and I developed a taste for strawberry growing, leaving only enough lawn for two to sunbathe on! During my student days, studying Biochemistry and Animal Physiology, another move took my mother and I to a garden in the North Pennines with a large bed of blackcurrants, the fruit with which I learned to love jam-making, despite the tiny size of the kitchen.

My first forays into whole garden-making arose through negotiations for my husband and I to be allowed to keep our puppy in our rented London flat. I offered to keep up the garden in exchange, and that Spring the display from the 250 bulbs I had planted in the front garden was spectacular!

A few years later, in our first house in Stanhope, I had only a concrete back-yard. But that soon developed raised beds, an alpine 'mountainside and lake', with roses and clematis clothing the unattractive walls.

My chance to really get stuck in came when my growing family moved two doors down the street to a 'proper' garden. It was more or less flat, which is rare in Weardale! Sadly, though, it was afflicted with a common problem: lawn in the middle and a thin rim of plants around the edge, almost certainly bought as a Sunday Supplement offer of "Colour in Every Season!"

I have to admit that I worked in the garden when I should have decorated the house. There was at least one important reason: there is a 50 foot drop behind the low railings at the end and I needed to extend the border away from it and plant prickly things to deter my young children from the easily acquired habit of watching the caravan site below (and forgetting themselves and falling!). Then I needed to plant a box hedge to keep balls off the plants, then I needed to plant up the sides to match and wouldn't that tall west-facing stone wall make a lovely site for fan-trained fruit trees and.....

I still garden there. I can't fit in anything more without becoming ever more creative with the spacing, and the time has come where I shall have to employ someone with a mini-digger, to remove what have already become large shrubs, to make space for my new, clearly essential, 'research'!

Oh, and the upshot of moving to my own real garden was that I left my career as a Post-Doctoral Biomedical Researcher, retrained in 2004 as a Garden Designer and started changing people's gardens and lives for the better!

Professional Development