In the beginning...

In the beginning we had a decent amount of land (2 hectares) but a lot of it was in fact water in the form of a moat surrounding this lovely 14th century house. The previous owners didn't live here and the only real garden they had created was two small flower beds within the moat - one of these, the Chapel Garden, was full of very old, woody thyme that smelt delicious but looked awful; the other was very pretty and in what we call the Secret Garden.

Outside of the moat we had two fields which were being used by our neighbour, Bernard, to graze his sheep. There was also an area between the moat and our Bernard's farm which was pretty scrubby.

Over the past ten years things have changed a little. For a start one of the fields has become our garden. A lot of it is still grass but there are also several flower beds and a vegetable plot. Secondly we were able to buy a small piece of land attached to this garden/field and although it is still a very messy field we have plans! The other field has just been planted with 1,500 trees, currently 60cms high but hopefully from small acorns mighty oaks will grow.