With the lifting of pandemic restrictions and the improving weather, spring 2021 was the right time to commit the last of our renovation budget to the garden. We could not stand the idea of another summer picking our way across a wasteland.
Two years of on-off building works had led to piles of bricks, quarry tiles and reclaimed doors dominating the garden. There was also contractor detritus, plumbing pipes, bags of plaster, rubble and garden gnomes left by the previous occupant. No grass, nowhere to lay down, nowhere to put a chair in the sun, nowhere to plant anything.
We wanted the garden to help with our home educating. An open-ended space that would accommodate open-ended play. We wanted the children to be able to run, climb, garden, observe nature, read, and have space for arts and crafts.
With our modest budget, the grand design needed to incorporate simple structures, basic materials and few decorative frivolities.
Often with a semi-detached period property, the garden stretches away from the back of the house. Unusually, ours occupies an L-shape, wrapping around the side of the house. So the back wall is no more than four metres from the back of the house.
The whole of the garden is on display from the kitchen windows. And as the garden is not very deep, structures like wendy houses, slides, climbing frames, trampolines or swings would clutter up the space. Their absence from the design suited our budget and our thoughts on how children should occupy a garden.
The design we chose
DW and I spent two months measuring the garden and working on a plan. Two years ago we’d commissioned a local landscaping firm to draw up one. But their design was unsatisfying. We did riff on one element; using curved lawn delineation. This feature was the only thing to remain in our own design and influenced us to add a few more curves to the garden.
Our design broke down into six main elements:
- a patio to connect two back doors
- a grassy terrace level
- beds for plantings
- lawn areas delineated to create ‘rooms’
- a dedicated space for a stock tank ‘pool’
- posts for hanging baskets
The project
The landscapers we chose for this job were two local garden contractors who had started up their own company. They were the first to agree that they were more used to installing fencing and raised beds than installing stock tank pools.
However, they showed real commitment to the job even when faced with unforeseen obstacles.
The original kitchen path was embedded in huge amounts of concrete, builder’s rubble was spread across the entire garden, our sandstone tiles broke as soon as you pushed them into the cement and our one small tree couldn’t be moved, as planned, due to the root system. Finally, they have to work out how to build a winding staircase out of sleepers. Having estimated the job at five days, they stayed for 17.
Our first phase, completed
You don’t need a garden to home educate your children. While the inside of the house was being renovated, we lived in a town centre flat where we shared a courtyard cum car park with a homeless guy under a bush. When we moved in to this house, the garden space for two years was mostly too hazardous and dirty to be ever be comfortable in it.
You can accommodate a great deal of home educating in a garden with a modest budget, a strong design, common materials and patience. Our budget meant that we certainly couldn’t have everything we’d dreamed of. We said goodbye to willow tunnels, rain chains and Corten steel ponds. The restrictions set by the budget kept us focused on more important basics: maximising space, allowing free movement and installing clear surfaces. So what we did get was space to set up an easel, do a handstand and splash about in the summer.
A day or so after the garden was ours, DS came into the kitchen having disappeared for a while. He’d been lying on his back in the grass looking up at the African swifts that arrive this time of year.
Our garden is a big space, pretending to be small