This urban garden transformation was the first gardening I ever did . The garden was in Tooting in South London and was about 9 metres long by 5 metres wide of the mark .
Although it contained a fair bit of rubble that I had to dig out out , the soil was a amazingly right loam , except in one niche where the London clay was only just below the surface .
I ’ve described the creation of this garden as follows :
“ I came to gardening quite late in life . As a child all I recall doing was spiel athletics . As an adult , in my mid-twenties and thirty , I ca n’t really think blend out of doors much at all , except to get to the pub , clubs , bars and restaurants I spent all my spare prison term ( and money ) in . But around the time I turned forty , it abruptly occurred to me that I could do something with the space attached to the back of my household , other than fume in it . So , I made a quite deliberate decision to initiate garden . For me , that meant learning everything I could about gardening in as unforesightful a space of time as possible – my bookshelves still creak under the exercising weight of the countlessgardening booksI purchase at that time .
The garden featured here was the ‘ distance attach to the back of my house ’ . I ’d renovated the interior of the business firm and decided to tackle the exterior .
As you ’ll see , there are n’t many ‘ before ’ or ‘ during ’ pictures , as I did n’t even have a right digital tv camera then .
The ‘ before ’ shots actually show my other gardening efforts . The actual ‘ before ’ shots , if they existed , would have shown a unembellished patch of dirt dominate by an out of control buddleia , surrounded byweeds .
When I first came to play on this garden , fuck nothing of gardening , I assumed that a small garden like this needed a tidy patch of lawn and some great borders with some compactplants . And that ’s what I started to create .
Before long , however , my reading led me to empathize that :
With those principles in idea , I coiffe to work . I was hard charm ( still am ) by Christopher Lloyd andGreat Dixter , by various gardens I visit in Cornwall , likeTrebah , by Will Giles’exotic gardenand , in a heavy flush of exuberance , by almost everything garden relate that I record and saw .
So , whilst I start set about to make an urban exotic garden , I throw in a few random lightbulb and perennials , likeThalictrums , along the way that would n’t have been out of place in one of Miss Jekyll ’s creation .
snap on the first moving picture below and habituate the arrow to scroll through .
The urban garden transformation in pictures
The next garden step
It was after gardening here for a couplet of years that I I felt the pauperization for more outer space to garden in , hence mymove to the suburbs .
Martin Cole has been an devouring plant devotee and nurseryman for more than 20 years and loves to talk and drop a line about gardening . In 2006 he was a finalist in the BBC Gardener of the Year contender . He is a member of the National dahlia Society .
He previously live in London and Sydney , Australia , where he took a diploma course in Horticultural study and is now based in North Berwick in Scotland . He found GardeningStepbyStep.com in 2012 . The website is point at everybody who loves plants or has been bitten by the horticulture bug and wants to know more .
garden footstep by Step has beencited by Thompson and Morgan , the UK ’s largest mail order flora retail merchant , as a website that publishes expert horticulture substance .
