Mike & Liz Hodson
We bought our house in August 2001 to use as a holiday home for ourselves, friends and family but, ultimately, with a view to us moving here permanently, which we were very lucky to be able to do in January 2012.
We learnt that the house was often referred to as ‘the Mortimer House’. It had been the home of Sidney Mortimer, whose fame lies in the story of his involvement in the rescue attempt, using his own boat, of the St Davids Lifeboat ’Gem’ and her crew in October 1910, a truly heroic but tragic episode in the history of the RNLI. As a result of the heroism displayed on the night of 13 October that year, Sidney and two Petty Officers were invited to Buckingham Palace, Sidney to receive the Conspicuous Gallantry Medal from King George V, and to have lunch with him afterwards! He subsequently became the youngest coxswain of the next St Davids Lifeboat, the youngest in the British Isles at age 18½.
Both the house and garden were in a dreadful state, having been much neglected for many years. One of the items left for us on arrival at the house on day of completion of sale was a Garden Diary which contained a hand drawn plan of the garden and plants. Unfortunately the diary wasn’t very helpful as the entries were rather sparse, and the plan might have been more of an aspiration than a record since it contained just about every shrub, perennial and annual imaginable.
The garden contained mainly shrubs but it was so overgrown that their trunks were similar in thickness to those of small trees. For example, those planted on one side of the plot had branches and leaves extending over to the other side. A path might have been there once but it was impossible to see one through the interwoven branches, and we couldn’t see any ground at all. It was a question of hacking through the centre of the ‘jungle’ to get to the other end of the plot – everything was chest height and higher, but on the way through we discovered a birdbath, a small pond and a set of steps which led nowhere but which were a physical reminder of the farmhouse that the property once was, and of the farm buildings which have now become the lovely holiday properties next to us. And we did find the path!
The garden is north-east facing so we don’t get as much sun throughout the day as would be ideal, and we think that whoever designed the garden originally did have some expertise because they had chosen plants which suited the conditions, and the colours and textures were obviously very carefully selected and placed. But, sadly, the shrubs were just too huge, other plants were not to our taste and, as we wanted to make it ‘our’ garden, they had to go. However, we have more or less kept the original shape and size of the borders and some of the shrubs on one of the boundary walls. And the icing on the cake is the gorgeous silver birch which is a beautiful feature, made even more attractive following its annual cleaning with a weak solution of washing up liquid and a hosing down around Easter time though at the time of writing it is still a job to do.
The garden suffered very badly from a drainage problem, ie. in very wet winters it became a quagmire. However, as part of a hard landscaping project in 2018, we had a land drain put in place which has solved the problem.
We like to encourage birds into the garden and welcome goldfinches, chaffinches, sparrows, dunnocks, blackbirds, robins, wrens, collared doves, a lovely thrush which has been a visitor again this year, tits of all kinds, and occasionally a woodpecker though we haven’t seen him for a while now. We’ve even had a squirrel, though we wouldn’t want him to be too regular a visitor. We also have bees, butterflies and other pollinating insects in the garden and the two little insect hotels on one of the sheds are occupied and vacated each year.
We were finding that our very large border was becoming difficult to manage with plants and weeds jostling with each other for supremacy, and it was looking a mess. However, for some time, it had seemed to me that at the edge of the border, near the greenhouse, was a natural opening for a path which could lead up through to just before the birdbath. So a turf path was laid resulting in two smaller borders which have been replanted are now much easier to manage.
So overall, the garden is looking established but, like all gardens, it is a work in progress and I hope we are nearer the end than the beginning (but we all know, don’t we, that gardens are never finished).
I’m afraid I would own up to being a ‘fair weather gardener’. I think Mike would be happy if the lawn has been mowed (his department), the birdfeeders are full, the birdbath is clean and full and the promise of a pre-prandial glass of something to be enjoyed in the garden in the early evening after a lovely sunny day – actually that would be the end to my ideal day in the garden too.
Mike and I hope very much that you will enjoy your stroll around our little piece of Heaven.