You don’t have to have a big garden to have something of envy, small gardens can be just perfect and give you the outdoor living space you want for you and your family to enjoy. What’s important is that it works in a way for what you want to do and how you want to use it.

Earlier this week I spent some time with Kathryn chatting about her Swanwick garden and the things she enjoys and loves about gardening. She’s a keen and avid gardener and takes great pride in her garden and it looks stunning as you can see.

The center piece of the back garden is a delightful 20 year old Acer (see photo right) which is beautifully shaped but also changes colour as the season progresses – giving the garden a different central colour theme towards summer.

Acers are great for creating a focal point and one that changes colour and has a interesting shape is definitely something to be proud of.

A Healthy Lawn

The lawn after it had been scarified and mowed – Perfectly shows off the beautiful Acer and it’s sumptuous cast shadow on the lawn!

Her garden is quite narrow at the back and long and has hedges on either side which obviously creates a certain amount of shade throughout the day.

The lawn has a continual “moss” issue which a lot of gardens have even though the lawn is on a slight gradient and drains well.

Areas nearer to hedges tend not to get the same light and they can be early indicators of poor lawn health – if they get dry, mossy and patchy.

One of the key aspects of ensuring a healthy lawn is as you remove material – moss, weeds etc. and applying chemical treatments that it gets replaced with new grass seed or, in extreme areas, re-turfing. Any type of treatment be it, chemical or physical (like scarifying) is attempting to remove something. If your lawn needs a helping hand, have a quick read through my article on scarifying for some hints and tips.

Lawns can get very dry and patchy with successive treatments – as shown below in this small patch (photo left).

A well drained lawn with moss and successive treatments needs something putting back in. If the lawn gets very dry, you can encourage growth with regular watering to protect the optimal growing conditions and offer an occasional feed too.

A patch like this can be spike aerated and using a combination of a nutrient rich soil dressing and new grass seed will help bring it back to life. Give new seeded areas upto 5 weeks growth to establish.

Keep the grass a reasonable length too. There’s a misconception that moss can be tackled with very short grass – it’s not a good strategy for treatment long term – keeping the lawn healthy and the soil it grows on is. A reasonable length gives the lawn it’s colour, the lushness and protects the soil from direct sunlight and drying out.

If your lawn is patchy – it’s time to add something back in to rejuvenate it.

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Today, I was very fortunate to meet a very nice chap, who is a retired engineer and also an avid gardener. He is kind, interesting, talkative, friendly and obviously enjoying his adventures as a gardener.

He’s lived in Swanwick for nearly 50 years now and went to school in South Normanton as a lad. He spent many years at Rolls Royce and now enjoys some of his free time crafting a beautiful little haven at the back of his property – affectionately named as “Dad’s Garden”.

It’s nice to chat with someone on the same wavelength and when he said to me “Birds know if you are going to harm them” it made me smile – because I knew exactly what he meant in an instance.

Just a few moments before saying it, two small birds had appeared from the bushes at the back of the garden to land just a feet or two from where we were standing.

He recounted that one day, he was sat out the back on his little swing seat and one landed right on his head! Takes me back to when I first read “The Secret Garden” when I was 7 or 8 years old. I’m sure what he says is true. Animals do have an intelligence about who to trust and I like to test this out especially with birds, by not doing anything that might scare them and see how close they are prepared to get. I think most Gardeners have an affinity with birds – usually you befriend a little Robin or a Blackbird that has slowly got to trust you over time.

As you can see from the above picture, his garden haven is quite small – it’s divided into two sections – the planting being dominant in the foreground and split by the green wooden screen with encapsulated trellis, behind which, is a seating area, the greenhouse and a small border area too.

The greenhouse laden with Geraniums

It’s a lovely space to sit in and you could chew the cud and put the world to rights for hours I’m sure.

In his words, there’s a lot more to see that’s still in the ground and I would love to go back and see more in the summer.

He opened up the picture gallery on his smartphone and showed me a stunning display of Dahlias.

It’s still early Spring, so there’s plenty of time for the spaces to fill out – but here’s a selection of some of the Springtime plants in bloom.

I guess there’s two things to take away from my visit today – It doesn’t matter how old you are you can still “potter about” in the garden – you might not be able to do everything yourself – but don’t give up on the things you can do because they account for a lot of the pleasure and contentment in your life.

And the second – We have all have so much more in common than we think or dare to believe.

A lovely chap, a great conversation and I hope to go back again at some point (maybe with some biscuits next time).

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