Nature

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Well, my name is Michelle and I have never had a blog before so this is also a first for me as well as trying to garden. I guess this is a diary of sorts…please correct me if I am wrong, I shan’t be offended! But let me start at the very beginning, which is a very good place to start (I think Mary Poppins sang something like that once…)

I am now 60, soon to be 61 and new to gardening – in fact, I love plants and looking at lovely gardens, and I am a vegetarian, but I just don’t seem to have the ‘knack’ to grow things as mostly they die when I try to grow or keep anything and that’s upsetting to me AND the plants – it was my son who used to plan and plant and grow things here, right from a young boy and has the ‘green fingers’ in our family – a natural at it you’d say and back in 1992 when we first moved into our little end terrace two-up two-down Edwardian workers cottage with it we inherited a long narrow garden 150 foot or thereabouts by roughly 15 foot wide, two slate tiled brick out-houses (one the a coal store and the other an outside lav) and this lush and green swathe, which was mainly lawn – and not at all matured. The willow tree next door to the right of me back then was tall and mostly in their garden, but over time grew even taller and bowed its graceful tresses over our garden becoming a natural ‘green’ parasol in the summertime giving us dappled shade and a circular fringe which eventually reached the ground but was also a source of kindling for my open coal fire in the winter time after the autumn storms had pruned and bought them down and yes, I asked my then neighbour if I could keep these spindly fingers and whippy branches for my coal fire and as I was then on benefits (a single parent not of my choice but by my ex-partner’s making) ‘every little helped’ keeping us warm indoors.

During those early years when I was retraining, I managed to get part time work and scrimped and scraped, went off to college to do a City & Guilds teacher training course stages I and II, whilst I taught Adult Education classes in watercolour for beginners in my village on a Wednesday evening, after previously finishing a full time course, an E.R.A.C. Diploma in Fine Arts, Crafts & Design, I managed to purchase an ex-display 8×4 greenhouse from Homebase for my then 13 year old son Christian to grow seedling plants in as well as a decent fork and spade to dig the proposed veggie patch up the end. Together we battled rampant ground elder, goose-grass (cleavers), an army of invading ivy, the mother tree elder (which is in folklaw unlucky to cut down so we left her and has since died of natural causes) and 6 foot high mean and viscous stinging nettles that had an underground network of roots that when we tried to dig the ground over thought we’d hit the other side’s electric cables! So bright and thick and yellow were these roots they almost fooled us into thinking we had B.T’s cabling in our back garden! I can verify this was not really the case and these nettles still grow to that height even today up there, so this then later after Christian left home in 2000 became my wild garden and my compost heap of grass and bush cuttings grew and grew up under the gnarled branches of my ancient greengage tree. What a venerable old lady she was and bountiful sweet treats she gave us when the weather conditions had been right. Every August it was a race against wasps and blackbirds to grab the feast she offered, but we always left the windfalls for other creatures to enjoy.

I had to battle this garden on my own after my son left home to marry and live ‘up North’ where he met and married my lovely daughter in law, Claire and decided to stay up there near her family. He lived in Rochdale until earlier this year when the neighbours there became abusive and threatening so he and Claire have moved and are now in Todmorden. When he lived in Rochdale Christian even won an award for his little garden given by the Council in a competition they ran for the best kept small garden sort of ‘Rochdale in Bloom’ kind of thing. I was so proud of him. Now he lives in a beautiful place nestled in a valley right near the moors, the wild places I love so much, and has the canal running at the back of his property, but is alas without a garden. They had only just moved in this summer when a few weeks later Hebden Bridge and of course, Todmorden were flooded with our awful wet stormy summer and it was shown on the BBC National News. But that’s a different story. I am planning a trip to see them soon as I haven’t been able to for three years when my mother passed away and Christian came home here for her funeral that February. So a lot has happened in the time my son left the nest to live his own life. But the garden here has been my sort of wild life sanctuary with its birds and squirrels and sparrowhawk whilst I have been living alone. I have managed to keep the grass (what is left of it) mowed, although getting the mower started is sometimes a feat in itself as it’s nearly as big as me (I am by the way tiny…at just 4 foot 10) and my arm reach is not a long as the pull cord so I have to shorten it!

I had planted honeysuckle along the boundary on the right a few years ago (and where my recent trouble has started with the erecting of new fence). I planted it because that is the name of my home, ‘Honeysuckle Cottage’ and the one old plant I did inherit was very old indeed, woody and massive on top it died when the storms hit one October time after I’d been here a few years when my end gable plaster also came away in a huge hunk leaving the chestnuts lathes way up there beneath bared to the elements until it was repaired on my house insurance. As I say, I lost the old honeysuckle recently when an old fence panel came down and broke, it snapped it off at the base in its dead wood. It never recovered and so further along the wire and post fence boundary I planted another in its memory, which is flourishing all across my lawn as the new fence panel that’s gone up it got torn down off the old fence and the old tree stump left over from a Landelii that was taken down three years hence. Now it sprawls languidly across my lawn instead of up.

I also planted a heavenly scented jasmine on the end of my brick outhouse facing the sunrise when my son was still living here – that has matured now and flourished and taken over the the outer wall in a fragrant heady bower where wild dog roses lace between it and ramble up through the canopy to face the sun and the jasmine sneaks curling tendrils up under the slate-tiled roof inside the old brick shed where I house my petrol mower and dusts the beam up there with a sprinkling of white star-like flowers. Directly opposite the jasmine on the edge of a half moon shaped border that my son dug out we planted a buddlia, the purple flowered ‘butterfly bush’. At the opposite end of the two brick sheds and nestled in the gap between the end of my downstairs bathroom’s outer wall and the brick outhouses sits my wooden shed that used to be an 8′ × 6′ heated cat house and was converted into my art/print room when I moved – this shed has survived two house moves. I brought with me when I originally moved over this way back in 1988 and moved it again when I came to live at Honeysuckle Cottage and it now houses my Farley proofing press (for my lino cuts) and now my bicycle as well. This shed-cum-art room too now wears a massive Afro-headed crown of ivy, a plant which comes from the neighbours on the left of me and has a main stem on my side of that boundary too as thick as a man’s well-flexed arm so trying to cut that down is impossible as it’s grown into the old wooden fence post there and on top of my shed it becomes a mammoth chore every couple of years or so to prune it back, but my neighbours that side ask me not to kill it off as it is now the roof to their brick outhouses and keeps the weather out as most of their slate tiles are missing. Of course I wouldn’t willingly kill anything and so we have had a laugh about that one.

My garden used to be interesting on both boundaries, but since the beginning of September the relentless march of this wooden fence, like an army it marches on, right up to the very end on my right hand side stripping the land clean of everything that was growing there that was previously encroaching and bleeding into mine. I own neither boundary by my Title Deeds and at best the rather spidery, shaky ‘T’ mark on the right hand boundary on my Land Registry plan looks to me like a later added on ‘addition’. Rose, the old lady who passed away a few years ago and used to live next door to me on the left told me once when I first moved in that these gardens, our cottages back gardens were all open and that there was a right of way to cross over them to the well, which was situated two doors up from me in their back garden and also that property had what was then a brick built wash-house for the use of the whole run of our six terraced workers cottages, built for King’s seeds, and that it used to house the big copper built into the corner, (No, NOT a policeman), but a deep round copper-lined tub that used to have a fire grate under it to warm up the washday water – your early 20th century washing machine with its manual wooden ‘dolly’ agitator and the Sunlight Soap and washing soda! (Look these things up on line if you cannot imagine them!)

Now, I have to hope that the person who owns the property to my left does not sell up too as its rented on short term lets and the people there come and go every year or so. This is what used to happen too on my right in the house on that short run of terraced houses that once was the police station and local lock-up, which is causing me grief at the moment over the erection of a new fence. My ex-neighbour who was renting it was lovely, never a problem, always accommodating to not block me in or take my light helped take down the three massive 30 foot landelii that a former neighbour put in and let run riot. It opened up my garden to natural light and once more mine flourished, but she was given her marching orders when the property was unexpectedly sold to these new purchasers in August of this year and hence the ‘handyman’ moved in and has been there ever since erecting the fence, panel by panel daily and as of today is up there still putting in the last two 6 foot panels and I might add, he’s doing it from MY side of the boundary……never mind though, eh? In the process of its progress he has totally wrecked the wildlife balance here by taking down trees, (no, no Tree Preservation Orders – I checked with the Council) obliterated all the plants and shrubs that were forming the boundary along the old wire and post fence (now also gone); following orders of the new young owners who aren’t even going to move in for a year. I do wonder what they have got to hide!

However, what I do have I have been using from the very start of this new boundary fence – my little camera, a 60th birthday present last November from my work colleagues. I have been taking pictures on it and some photos of him today on my land, even if he is a dot in the distance, I do have evidence of trespass. If I decide to use it, it may cost me my home in the end as I cannot prove now where the original boundary went, he has removed all signs of it and my greengage tree, there in neither a stump nor branch left on my side, unless of course, its now on HIS side of this blasted 6 foot eyesore. The only way I could prove anything is to maybe ask the owners of the property whose garden runs at right angles to ours to let me come into their garden, (which runs along the end of all our gardens) and allow me to take some photos over their low privet hedge to see if my tree stump is in his garden now. Then I will know if he has pinched my land or not. But at the end of the day I wonder, really, is it worth it, all the hassle and legal the costs involved, and I should know these will be expensive, I do work for a Company Solicitor in the biggest House Building firm in the country in the legal department…at least when I go back to work on Monday I can ask her for some free legal advice. In the end it comes down to the principle of the thing. And the fact that I wasn’t asked and if the willow tree is taken down he’d have to come onto my land to do it as one of its main branches goes the whole width and some more across my garden. The squirrels drey is up there too, which is a shame as they’d have to move house although there are still some trees left around in other peoples gardens, but I’d also have nothing left on which to hang my bird feeder and that, Dear Reader, is a real crying shame….

• 25 Oct, 2012
• 8 likes

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