Hello, everyone!

Love the name Gaia: personification of the Earth. "Gaia is the ancestral mother of all life: the primal Mother Earth goddess."

With a name like that I reckon everything in your garden will GROW!

The patio does look inviting, I must say. Bet the rest of the household enjoy it even if they don't exactly share your love of gardening, and with Aphrodite around the corner I'm waiting for Eros to make an appearance.

...or the Gaia satellite charting a billion stars.

Hi Gaia, welcome to GOY, you will find ideas & people a-plenty here to share your interests with from overseas as well as in the UK.
We're a friendly & helpful lot so feel free to ask questions or share your gardening enthusiasm.

Welcome to GOY and the madness of British gardeners! As Eirlys says I expect the family does enjoy the garden even if they haven't the enthuiasm of a true gardener. You say the ferns are your husbands so presumably he has some interest! Teenagers - well they have hormones, i-pads, Facebook and loads of other things to occupy them, but at least they have the garden to sulk in if necessary!
The garden looks good, the view behind the patio, is this your garden or a borrowed view? Looks enticing and the patio looks as if it may cover both the full sun and shaded area needs.

Welcome to goy from me also,I liked your photos very much,but best of all I liked the view over the little fence under the tree into the garden,beautiful.

Welcome to this site. I hope you enjoy it here :)
Some nice photos of your garden. I like your seating area. It looks comfortable and relaxing :)

welcome from me too. please keep sharing your garden with us. we love to see what others are doing. it is lovely Gaia.

Welcome to Goy, I hope you get as much enjoyment from here as I always have done.
Gaia your garden looks lovely, I too love the view through the gate and the patio is a very attractive place to sit and relax, mine too does get neglected at times, the way I see it the living things must always come first. I like your husbands fernery, I have a little stumpery right down the bottom of my garden and I've planted ferns in there, so many to choose from, I also planted bluebells, native primroses and hostas, a big mistake as the slugs and snails have had some right tasty meals, I was wondering about spreading bark around my plants before the winter comes, don't normally use it but think it would suit the stumpery..
Lovely photo's Gaia..

Welcome from me, too. I have been here a couple of weeks now and so glad I found it, so I hope you will enjoy it as much as I do.

I think your garden looks so relaxing and pretty, and I like how you have the different areas to explore. Really nice, well done :)

Awww, thanks, everyone! I'm always nervous to share photos because I don't feel my space is anywhere near the same league as a lot of other gardens I see on here. But I get so much inspiration from your photos and comments.

To answer some of the questions I've been asked:

Yes, that view beyond the patio is my garden, not a borrowed view. You can just see my now teen daughter's Wendy House (husband's bike shed now!). We live in a standard 3 up 3 down Victorian house and the garden is long and narrow. I've tried to avoid the landing strip or bowling alley approach to designing it. That little fence at the end of the patio is one I 'borrowed' from another area. I have positioned it cattywampus so that you do not walk off the patio in a straight line but at an angle.

That lovely arching willow tree at the end of the patio has just had an extensive haircut as it was extremely overgrown. I loved the shady feeling in that space but it was cutting out so much light from the house and the garden that we had to take drastic measures. It's been cut right back and we're flooded with sunlight which is not exactly what I wanted as I had hoped to maintain some shade. However, moving forward, we can prune and keep it in check and train it to grow in a pleasing shape.

My husband enjoys the garden and he does help me but he is generally the bank roll and the labourer. :-) I love that he got excited about the fern bed (even if I weed and maintain it, we still refer to it as his, haha).

We'e both been in extremely stressful jobs the past few years so the garden has gone neglected. We are slowly claiming back the embarrassing corners!

Thank you for the lovely welcome!

Well you needn't be nervous about showing photos of your garden. It's lovely ... and it isn't a competition anyway. We're all here to help each other and everyone's garden is different.
My own garden is in a dreadful mess ... doesn't look too bad on a photo as long as I chose what angle I take it from lol :)

Awww, thanks, Hywel. I love your photos and blogs. You make gardening seem so accessible. And I know what you mean about canny angles!

Hi, and a welcome from me as well. Your blog did make me smile, since moving to this house and finding GOY, I have become a lot more passionate about gardening and my hubby and daughter tendto just roll their eyes :-). The other day I got all excited that a plug plant I had bought in the spring had finally started to flower and told my daughter saying the name of the plant. Again she just rolled her eyes and told me I would just have to point at it as she had no idea which plant I was talking about. Your garden looks really lovely and I love your sitting area, it looks so inviting. Jen :-).

I must add my love of the name Gaia. I heard it first just a few years ago. Didnt know it meant 'Earth'. Wonderful! Welcome to Goy. I love an old Victorian garden..there are usually trees and shade. I can see you have plenty of shade, which always looks so inviting to me. My garden is very exposed and I have had to plant my own trees for future shade. So its a waiting game now! :)