An English country garden on the West Coast of Scotland

For the last four years I’ve been engaged in a project almost as overwhelming and consuming as the other two going on concurrently with it. The other two are raising a small child and writing (and earning a living)… this third which worked its way in slyly, masquerading as necessity for a long time, is creating an English country garden here on the west coast.

It began with simply clearing the enormous site that is this garden. Bordering the sea, completely colonised by rhododendrons and every pernicious weed in the book, it was dark, marshy and windswept. I had come from a little courtyard garden in Oxford, whose size was completely in tune with my utter indifference to gardening. It took over a year for me to realise first that it was possible to change the environment, and following hard on this thought came the understanding that it was essential. Stuff grows three feet a year here. It’s like the tropics, but without the sun.
Over the last four years I’ve built by hand a carport, patio, paths, drystone walls. I’ve cut down trees and planted hedging. I’ve built drains (making it up, and then realising I had inadvertently created ‘French’ drains). I’ve killed loads of stuff, mostly through ignorance, and saved a whole lot more.
And in the midst of this, almost secretly to myself I began to grow flowers from an English country garden. Cornflowers, daisies… even hollyhocks which look so wonderfully huge and daft shortly before they get blown over that it’s worth it. I didn’t know how much I love these flowers, how they remind me of ‘home’ whatever that is. I’ve created a wildflower bank in my garden, currently stocked with cornflowers and daisies, grown by my own instruction-blind ‘triffid method’: sow in compost indoors, treat like your most expensive houseplant, and plant out once it’s sunny. And behold – giant gorgeous versions of the plants I remember, nodding in amusement at where they’ve fetched up.

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