In Planning Mode

We have always meant to create a garden on this site alongside the productive, small-holder bits but had only vaguely formed fluffy notions that it might be here and it might contain this or that plant. We have started last year with a nice flower bed 'out front' using seed salvaged from the Kent garden - hollyhocks, Erigeron (Spanish daisy), love-in-a-mist, Welsh poppy and Californian poppy and Granny's Bonnets - and we'd started to accumulate bits and pieces in pots in the yard, but it was all very late by the time we finished builder-ing and things did not really get cracking.

Not a bother. Gardening, to us, is always a long term project, never an instant-gratification, weekend make-over fix. We tend to happily plant things 'this year' knowing they will look good 'next spring' or even a decade or more away. In Faversham we had been gardening for 19 years and had the 100' by 24' strip crammed with perennials, shrubs, the (very crowded) orchard with the 'woodland garden' under it. I took a separate allotment to give me some veg' growing space but we were, by the time we'd 'finished' lost for space and unable to buy any plants because of not having anywhere to plant them. What we did buy had to be small and stay small. Here, on our 2.5 acres, we have the opposite problem. Small plants would be lost in the space, so we need to be talking 'drifts' of colour and bigger shrubs and trees.

Both Liz and I are keen and (if I can say this modestly enough!) quite knowledgeable gardeners by now but as spring starts to move and give us parachutist's "ground-rush" we were still dithering even as to which bit of the site to do the gardening in. I have started digging a pond in the space between the hay barn and the orchard, so one candidate was the (as yet only gleam-in-the-eye) "Pond Garden" but most of the decisions had been up to now, NOT to garden in places. We like the front lawn as an expanse of green so this is only likely to get drive edges of ox-eye daisy and Gypsophilia. Up the left hand side of the barn has the ex-Steak-Lady offerings in it but is probably just a holding area.

Things were given a boost by local Aladdin's Cave shop Wispy's who suddenly launched their garden centre display stocked with an amazing rage of plants at silly prices - 3 for €5, €1.99 and so on. Liz and I fell upon the display and filled a bag, climbing rose, mock orange, Convallaria, Echinops, red hot poker, Echinacia, almost-black hollyhocks..... Driving home we got to talking that NOW we'd need to start the garden to have somewhere to house this bounty.

We love this stage and have a good team method. I go striding about in the frost with my gloves on and my biro sputtering in the freezing air to create a rough plan. Liz converts this into a sensible scale map with 1 m squares with the software package 'MS-Visio'. It is a joy to watch her. She borrows Visio's pre-prepared cloud shapes and squishes them long and thin to represent hedges. She draws lines and pulls them out of shape to make bits of pond shore-line, re-sizes stuff and colours in boxes for 'the'allotment' or adds circles to represent trees in the orchard.

The Visio map we can then print several copies of to allow for some quick 'concept' scratchings as we dream up a path here or a gentle bank there, a trellis to hide the caravan or a willow 'igloo' over there. Things get rubbed out as many times as they get created. The many gardening books come out as we start to home in on what might go into the space - Monty Don, Geoff Hamilton, Bob Flowerdew, Penelope Hobhouse, Hessayon's 'expert' series all get gleaned for bits on damp gardens, damp shade, structure, colour. The umpteenth version will be the one that gets kept. Liz jokes that she will preserve that so that in ten years time we can look back and say "Well, that is what we were going to do, but we never did ANY of that!". That is the way of gardening.

Things evolve and move on. Some of the plants we plan, we never actually find for sale so other things slot in. Some bits work and others don't. Some plants take off like mad things. You get given donations by generous gardener friends. We like that here because space is what we have for the moment, so "invasive", "rampant" and "thug" can be good words. Well, I wake up this morning to find that Liz was at it well into the wee small hours and the 'umpteenth' map is well peopled with Achillea, Regal Lilies, Rudbeckia, Hostas, lavender, foxgloves, lilac and Potentilla  and Crocosmia.

Now we just have to go out there and 'do' it. The pond itself needs finishing so that the spoil can be shaped into the landscaping and the stones can become the edges of mini raised-beds for the less wet-tolerant species. The bank on the west side needs clearing of its fallen elder, grown-up-through nettles and stoloniferous grasses and , it turns out, we need to unearth the buried 'treasure', in this case a tractor mounted fertilizer spreader; we could only see the rim sticking up and had thought it might be an oil drum. Thank you Mr Farmer for that nice surprise!

All the fine-tuning, digging, raking, preparing seed beds and planting holes is a bit of a way away, but the future beckons and we have 'The Vision Thing'. We can see ourselves sitting in our Darby and Joan chairs watching the sun go down over the pond as the geese splash about in the evening light. The leafless winter dogwood stems glow crimson and the happy perennials sleep beneath their mulch of compost. We'll get there.