Tom Burke’s Blog

This page will hold details of the work on the garden.

Week 1: Our contractor to do the groundworks suddenly arrived on Monday 1 October, obviously meaning business: early that morning I heard a lot of noise from the garden, went to a back room to investigate, and saw this apparition!

Then they started lighting fires!!

The following morning everything looked very forlorn: all the fences gone (those bushes you can see on either side are actually in the next-door gardens) and everything looking very bare.

But in a couple of days some real progress was being made, with the first part of the patio laid and the lawn boundary laid out.

<p>By the middle of the second week we had new fences as well, sturdy ones. I’m very aware of the old adage “Good fences make good neighbours”.

One of the features of the new garden will be the variety of textures: in addition to the usual lawn, patio & planting there are considerable areas of stones of various sizes: some boulders, large pebbles, small pebbles, and the dry-stone river bed. Here are a couple of pictures of some of the stone featues the day after they were put in:

On Friday the 19th (the end of the thrid week) the time came to move the mountain of rubbish that had been taken out of the old garden. Here are a couple of pictures; the first shows Gary in the digger at the start of the day, perched at the top of the mountain – he called it ‘Ben Nevis’ – and the second shows the last digger-load being loaded into the dumper truck to be taken round to the front of the house.

The rubbish was taken round to the front of the house in the dumper truck and dropped onto the drive. The heap was pretty impressive, and twice during the day a grabber-truck came and took the heap away. The pictures below show the 1 o’clock lift: the 4pm lift was as big, and Gary reckoned that all in all they’d moved something more than 20 tons.

So here we are at the end of the third week. I can see the final shape now: here’s a picture taken at the end of Friday from the bottom of the garden (where Ben Nevis had been) looking towards the house.