Five years ago today a large removal van pulled away from outside our old, rambling Victorian house with all our worldly goods inside and drove 20 miles south down the A49 to Bluebell Cottage. We followed behind with two cats and one daughter (we dropped the other daughter off at Uni to save space) and attempted to squash our belongings in through the charmingly bolt-studded front door. As cottages go, it isn’t tiny – it was once home to at least three labourers and their large families. Their confined, cold lives here are unimaginable. But for a family of four twenty-first century adults with a lifetime of accumulation, scaling down to two and half bedrooms was more than a little tricky. Half of our stuff had been dropped off at charity shops in Warrington in the months before, but we still put much of it into the garage here in boxes. Some of it is still there.
It felt then, and almost certain was, an act of madness. I still occasionally wake up sweating, remembering that we hadn’t completed on our old house and that we bought this place on a self-certified mortgage – effectively a wing, a prayer and a couple of optimistic signatures. We could only have afforded the double mortgage for about six months before we ran out of cash. We were lucky.
But nothing much had been done in the nursery or garden since the For Sale sign went up in August 2006. Ten thousand unsold plants sat rooted into the gravel, riddled with hairy bittercress and liverwort, draped with the dead remnants of the previous summer’s growth. Many had not been potted on for two years and were splitting their pots with roots desperate for escape.
The large back polytunnel was full of wide, high raised benches – so high that I couldn’t reach the middle without a stepladder – and packed tight with barely alive plants. Somewhat disturbingly the benches were covered in a polythene wrap of bacon packaging.
The garden too had been left to its own devices since the previous summer. Almost two acres of mixed borders needed a massive clear up exercise before visitors could be let in. And I had almost no idea what was underneath all that dead top growth.
Some horrors needed no uncovering. These plastic gems were in a little woodland corner in the garden.
A few weeks – or even months of run-up time would have helped, but the nursery was listed in the RHS Plant Finder as opening to the public on the 17th March – three weeks after we moved in. And the garden was due to open for the National Garden Scheme on the 26th April. The great, the good and the curious of Cheshire would be dropping into to admire our beds of weeds, dead perennials and clogged up ponds in 8 weeks time.
Five weeks later we opened for the National Garden Scheme. The sun shone and 130 people turned up, nodded approvingly and ate all the cake.
I stood at the entrance on that first NGS day in the spring sunshine, clean, smart-ish and sporting an exhaustedly weak smile. I clearly recall so many people told me what an idyllic life I now had and how lovely it must be to be here. I think I said wearily, ‘ask me again in a few years’.
3 Responses to “Bluebell Cottage, five years on. Part One…”
Hi Sue, This rang so many bells. Not the circumstances so much as the prep for open days and the 'exhaustedly weak smile'. What an achievement. I look forward to the rest of the story.
Best
Robert
I have enjoyed watching it through a friends eyes and now enjoy the recap.
Totally inspiring blog….photos before and after…
amazing.
Stacey
http://www.downtoearthdigs.wordpress.com