Full Tour of our 250 Year Old Cottage Garden – Ducks, Spring Flowers & Edible Garden

Here is a full tour of our garden for those of you who are new here and would like to have a look around! We filmed this at the end of spring, so it is in a transition period before summer arrives. Some parts of the garden are a bit messy, but that’s OK. We show you some of the projects we have completed over the last five years, some works in progress and what to expect in the year ahead. You can also meet our flock of runner ducks too!

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[Music] hello and welcome to our Cottage Garden I’m going to give you a complete tour today so if you’re new this will be a really good opportunity to familiarize yourself with the space see what we’ve done with it over the years and we’ll talk you through what our aims are for each pocket of the garden you’ve joined us on a really gorgeous sunny day um we’re at the end of May and just about to go into June so we’re in those transitional days between spring and summer and we did actually show you around a full Garden Tour about 2 years ago um you can watch that back if you want to see some of the changes that happened between then and now um quite a lot to be honest so I’m really excited to show you around today a bit of context for you we live in a cottage in Somerset that’s about 250 years old we’ve been here for 5 years and the reason we fell in love with the house was because of the garden um I didn’t have any Garden knowledge when we came here and we’ve been here 5 years and my strategy has just been learn as you go learn from mistakes and try not to be too perfectionist which can be a bit of a challenge but you’ll see what walking around there’s plenty of things that aren’t perfect we live here with our two dogs and our three runner ducks which hopefully you’ll get to meet in the course of video here with the dogs at the moment but let’s get started down here we’re just a couple of meters away from our kitchen so I used this kind of Rockery area to grow a few herbs I’ve got some mint some Rosemary and some thyme and so if I ever need these while I’m cooking I can pop outside and grab them but they’re really all easy perennial plants and for the mint especially it’s good to keep it contained in a small space because it has a tendency to spread and take over otherwise we also have a collection of Hoster plants down here because it’s quite a shady spot um so we don’t want things that need full sun these were given to us by a family member with the intention of us moving them up to the pond but we used this area for kind of storage and had them placed here and just fell in love with them but we’re really happy with the hostas down here so we will reshuffle these slightly but I think we are probably going to have a permanent Hoster collection around the edge of the house I’ve also got a Claus Montana and a Wisteria and these were some of the first things that I planted when we moved in 5 years ago they look really gorgeous in Spring the Wisteria just flowered for the first time this year so it was a game of patience with that one but one of those things it’s good to get in the ground as early as you can and then before you know it you see it in flower these steps I try to soften with aideron so that’s these lovely daisy flowers and they look really good this time of year and they spread really easily as well when they go to seed I just sprinkle the seeds on the steps and they continue to spread I grow lots of strawberries here as well in the bed behind me and this is just because if I grow them any further away from the house they get eaten by mice um so keeping them near the house with the watchful eye of the dogs it’s a really good strategy for pest prevention on those but now let’s move up the garden and I can show you some of the other areas [Music] and in the Border next to the steps I grow a collection of helor so if you’ve ever seen our winter videos You’ll see these when they are in flower it’s something I’m building up gradually over the years as with most of the garden but this soil was awful when we moved in we had to do quite a lot of work top dressing it with compost to get it to be usable and we did plant a few things like Holly Hawks and budia that don’t mind poor soil initially just to get some life back in there and start breaking it up from underneath with the roots but it’s worked really well and 5 years down the line we’ve got lots going on here um you can also see we’ve got some nepita I love long soft flowers around the kind of FMA structures like the steps I just think it looks really beautiful and soft so this is a favorite and it’s a really really generous plant and you can see in front of me the bees love it too in the gaps things just self seed freely we’ve got forget me knots these have more or less finished now and gone to seed and you can see these will just spread around and self-seed everywhere we get Fox gloves popping up a bit of comence free and some of the things that are more difficult to remove but they’re still beautiful plants um we will be changing this area slightly tomorrow um we’ve got a massive delivery of U Hedges coming in the aim of giving us a bit more privacy so we’re going to be lining either side with u Hedges really really excited to get that done and kind of kicking myself that we didn’t do it earlier on and that is the border at the top of the [Music] steps you see as we move up the garden it’s divided into small and flat levels and we use each of these for kind of different reasons and I love this way of gardening and each space has its own kind of theme so this first level we use for our Wildlife Pond that you can see next to me um it doesn’t have much going on in the way of plants and that’s definitely something that we want to change in the future years but it does have a lot of life in there and there are hundreds of NES and frogs and insects too and I can see a n right now which is really really lovely so this is such a valuable thing to have in the garden and you really see a benefit in terms of slug control as well so I grow hosters next to this and normally they’re something that are quite threatened by slugs but because we’ve got NES and frogs those eat the Slugs and it makes it easier to grow those kinds of plants so it’s a really helpful thing to have in terms of wildlife but also natural pest control and it’s beautiful I just love sitting next to it and seeing the life that goes on this time of year above the pond we’ve got this Smoke Tree and this was here when we moved in I’ve opened this up quite a lot this week so that there’s a better view up and down the garden and I’m really glad I did it this is another plant that’s really popular with the bees and you can still see there’s quite a few on there where it’s sent out its flowers for spring I don’t do much with the lawn here it’s mainly a part of the garden that’s used by the dogs so I don’t want to be too precious about planting bulbs and naturalizing things we just keep it quite short so that the dogs can play it and there’s a lower risk of ticks um and then the borders again we’re going to be fiddling with these tomorrow so they’re going to be quite changed and they’re a bit of a mismatch at the moment but I do still enjoy the things that self-seed we get so many Fox gloves and aalas this lower part of the garden is a really lovely Sun trap as well so we’ve got a table and chairs and we love to sit out here and have our dinner on sunny days the lawn is edged by some Railway sleepers which thankfully we didn’t have to install oursel they were here when we moved in and we’re always so grateful for the things that people did before us that have lasted the years and that’s the first room of the garden [Music] this is the second level of the garden and I usually refer to this as my crocus lawn because I’ve planted thousands of pck crocus bulbs underneath the grass and in the start of spring it looks so beautiful and I’ve made a point to do this close enough to the house that I can see it out the window if the weather’s particularly miserable and I don’t feel like getting outside but again the crocuses are really good forage for the early bees at the start of the year when not much else is in and flour and then we let the grass grow really long for about 6 to 8 weeks after they finished flowering and then we just mow it and use it again as a normal lawn for the dogs um we’ve got shade on one side and sun on the other so it’s a little bit tricky to have symmetry and I’ve kind of just given up on trying this side of the garden though is Deeper Shade and it’s more difficult to do things with I’ve got a few plants like a box hedge a hydranga some hbor but it’s a little bit more of a challenge again we’re going to put use in tomorrow which can see we have done on the other side already so hopefully we’ll get a nice symmetrical hedge running along either side and thankfully U is a really adaptable hedge it can go in the shade or the Sun so we should be able to get some symmetry once we’ve got those hedges in you will notice as we start to move up the garden now we’ve got some really really beautiful dams and trees that line either side and these again have just self-seeded naturally over the years I imagine these trees have been here for hundreds of years so the gardens used to be used in a kind of shed small holding sense weon people would grow food and raise animals and you can imagine maybe these dams and trees were part of their forage and have self-seeded over the years and The Offspring are here today which is really really cool potentially they are a bit crowded in some areas and might need thinning just so that they can have the best opportunity to grow so we’ll be fiddling with that once we get our hedges in tomorrow but this time of year we just use the lawn for the dogs sometimes we let the ducks come out here it’s more of a recreational space than a curated one behind me you can see a small barn and we had to renovate this after we moved in so the walls were still standing but the roof was completely rotten it was used to store logs for firewood but we really really wanted to get a flock of ducks so we set our goal as repairing some of these structures and then as a reward we bought the flock of ducks this Stone Barn would have been part of the original small holding so it’s really really cool that that’s still here after all of those hundreds of years and it was one of the first projects that we took on when we moved in 5 years ago and that is our second bit of lawn [Music] so next to the duck house we have this lovely stone flower bed and although the stone was here when we moved in this was completely covered in Ivy so it was quite a job for me to expose it and get some space to plant things but after I did that I planted an assortment of shage loving plants so we’ve got helbor and then a couple of hydranges at the back which I think get just about enough sunlight that they’ll be able to flower but I only put those in last year so we will see in a couple of weeks time um but it’s quite nice dappled sunlight on here and then we’ve got two big plum trees at the back including I think probably the biggest one we’ve got in the garden um so they’re so high up we can’t pick the plums we just wait for them to fall and then collect them and I usually make jam from them I’ve put some Japanese and enemies in here as well these are called World Swan but the main event is the halor at the start of the year there’s some beautiful cobbled stone down here that again I’m assuming are original to the house um so that’s a really lovely feature and I am trying to get some erigeron to flower in this area not quite successfully yet I think I’ve got three or four plants but I imagine that they will self-seed and hopefully take over this area to soften it a bit we do get quite a lot of weeds sprouting and I leave quite a lot of weeds in place around the garden I think they’re not that bad I think we have been too strict in the way that we weed our Gardens so rigorously and actually a lot of them are just wild flowers that are good for insects in the Border behind me I grew some really lovely daffodils at the start of the year so you can see these are finished now and the leaves are left I know a lot of people do tidy these up by folding them over and then looping a leaf around to kind of bundle them um I haven’t really had time to do that so I’ve just left them but they should return every year and be really beautiful in Spring but that is the area around the duck house [Music] this is our third area of lawn and you can probably hear that we’re right next to the Ducks now we’ve got a few things going on here but I would say it’s probably the area where I focused most of my energy in the garden over the last year we have a seed bed that was here when we moved in and for the last 5 years I’ve used this to grow my tulips but I have to rest it now cuz they weren’t very healthy this spring and I think the soil needs to recover we have shed and this is another thing that we had to rebuild build soon after moving in um the foundation was fine but we had a smaller wooden shed built on top of it that was so rotten when our friend came to help us rebuild it he said it was kind of lucky that it hadn’t collapsed on us so that was a bit scary um but he built this really beautiful shed for us and did some arched windows that are similar to the church that he lives in he built around the elder tree that’s flowering at the moment which we think is a really cool feature and we also installed a water butt and some guttering so that we can Harvest rain water for the garden too so we’re really happy with this and then in the last couple of years we’ve also wired water and electricity up here so we’ve got the water butt that refills itself and we can use that to change the duck’s water and then we’ve wired in electricity so that we can have some lights in the evening and anything else that we need to charge including power tools and that sort of thing so that’s made gardening a lot easier I’d say the borders around here probably for the most part in the garden aren’t finished yet I am really gardening in like a drip and drabs kind of way and Building Things up over the years and partly because I’m learning as I go partly because I fall in love with different plants throughout the years but I also don’t want to rush I want each plant to feel really special and doing it slowly means you can remember where you got it from who gave it to you and you can look at things and remember why you’ve got them so while I’m stood here I can see that we’ve got the wild Swan Japanese and enemies in flower and I bought these after seeing so many of them on our honeymoon we did a mini mooon where we visited some gardens around the country and they were something that I really loved so bringing them into the garden reminds me of that time we’ve also got a rose there called silus mana and my friend gave us that as a wedding present so that’s really special um but that’s one of the reasons I didn’t want to sort of bring everything in instantly just from one Garden Center I want it to grow and be an expression of people and memories and just lovely things obviously the elephant in the room is this massive pile of logs next to me so this doesn’t live here permanently don’t worry this is normally a bit of lawn but we are currently moving around our bug hotel and basically every time we cut down big trees and shrubs we keep some of the branches and we just make piles of them around the garden so that the insects can use them as a habitat um and it’s a really really good thing to do in the garden we’re just moving them around at the moment because we’ve had to put some wiring in where they were situated so next time you’re here this will be tidier and please do give us a subscribe if you’d like to follow our Cottage Garden Journey over the coming months so you can see once we’re in this bit of the garden that it starts going uphill instead of being leveled and this does present some challenges for gardening especially if we’re moving heavy things around and we also don’t have direct Road access so it’s really really tricky to bring in bulk bags of compost for example or if we want to do any Landscaping getting the materials in for that so those are some of the challenges that come with the garden but I do love this kind of slope because it helps us have a really nice view from the house window you can kind of see all of the layers at once and it compresses into one really lovely image it does mean as well that we have slightly different weather conditions in different parts of the garden for example the way the water pulls because it runs down the hill and then gets stuck by the pond it can get really boggy at the bottom of the garden whereas here it’s um much better drainage you can see behind me this is an area where I keep the grass long um so we’ve just finished doing no M which means part of the grass we’ve left really Lush and long for the insects and this is where I grow my spring flowering bulbs I grow snow drops snakes head filler daffodils and then there lovely wild Prim roses and some blue bells in there too this time of year though I expect it to look quite messy um but I actually really really like the seed heads on the snakes head feries I think they’re beautiful and they’re quite architectural in their own right I don’t normally like the way that seed heads look once flowers are finished but I think they they kind of look like the aliums that you see elsewhere in the garden and they go really nicely with that um so I’m actually pleasantly surprised by those but they are going over now and um starting to drop their seed so the aim is these will naturalize over the years to come and hopefully we’ll get more impressive displays in consecutive years but that is our third area of [Music] lawn so up the hill slightly we have these two flower borders they both get a mix of sun and shade shade in different parts so again not too much symmetry but I think a Cottage Garden is quite forgiving in that sense and is more of a happy jumble of plants anyway you can see we have this really lovely oak tree um that was obviously here before we moved in we reckon it might be 30 to 50 years old if anyone knows oak trees better please do correct me because I have absolutely no expertise in the area it’s not an ancient tree it’s relatively young as far as oak trees go um but it’s still quite amazing we also have this ACA tree which again here when we moved in we’ve got the elder tree and some more plum trees so A really lovely assortment of trees and they all bring us different things one of the most unusual things about this area though is The Big Greenhouse this is full of agave mostly and they are huge bigger than me I did do a little bit of tidying in here and I did remove some of the cacti initially I wasn’t sure that I wanted to keep them and I wanted to turn it into more of an orangery or maybe grow some Chamas in there um but over time I did fall in love with those huge ages and decided to keep them it needs a little bit of TLC it could use the plaster being res skimmed inside so still a work in progress as a lot of things are around the garden but one day we’ll get to it and maybe perfect it a little bit more but I still think it’s a really cool feature and outside of summer we move our tables and chairs in here so that we have somewhere to sit in the winter that’s a little bit warmer than the rest of the garden um and it’s sheltered from the rain and it makes a really lovely place to sit and read a book The Border next to me I edged with some Willow recently and you can watch I think I think this is in my April Garden Tour I show you the process of how I did that I’m a complete beginner I’ve done a few hurdles around the garden but I don’t have any real experience with it but it was really beautiful material to work with and I’m so pleased with how it’s come out you can see at the moment we’ve got some aliums in flour these are Mount Everest and then we’ve got a couple of structural lustrum in there as well that have been trained as standard and this was something I did so that in winter when everything dies back there’s a bit more of a kind of structured feel because I didn’t have a lot of greens when we moved in the borders are still quite gappy I let them fill with things like oxid daies that self-seed in naturally but as I move some more perennials in I will remove the um self-seeded oxidases but I don’t like to have bare soil I either let weeds come in and cover the soil or I’ll have a natural mulch of compost or leaves or grass cuttings um but I try to keep the soil covered at all times when we first moved in this area was really overgrown we had a bamboo plant and it was one of the running varieties so it would send really long roots and then send up another plant after you think you’ve got on top of it so that covered most of this part of the garden and it took years to get out I still find small parts of it that have started shooting so it’s going to be an ongoing job for me to keep it under control but we’ve tackled most of it now and been able to plant things largely in its place which is amazing we also had a really huge conifer tree in this area and it was massive and unsightly and didn’t bring much benefit to Wildlife so we cut that down a few years after moving in and it really really transformed this area it brought in a lot more natural light but it also gave space to the oak tree for it to grow and even in those couple of years I think it’s been two or three the amount of growth that the oak tree has put on is actually quite amazing I was looking at photos of it um from a few years ago and it was so much smaller so I think it really does make a difference if you can open up space for the trees that are here after we took the conifer tree out we were able to get some fencing in and we recently put these hazel hurdles on either side and they make a really big difference to the privacy we’re gradually screening them with climbers um mostly some winter flowering clematitis to give us an evergreen kind of screening but also some flowers in winter when there’s not much else going [Music] on so next to me here we have the smaller Greenhouse where I start my seedlings it is looking a massive mess in there at the moment cuz I haven’t had time to keep on top of it but when we moved in this was really really covered in Rambles and we had to clear them off and I built the raised bed and the table from some old pallet wood that we got from a scrapyard and then we have the poly tunnel next to me as well which is amazingly useful for growing things like melons cucumbers Tomatoes any of those heat loving plants in summer it’s got some lovely summer fruiting raspberries next to it too um and these are covered in bees at the moment that are pollinating the flowers so it won’t be long until we get some fruit from those I do like to grow things in kind of polycultures rather than neat lines I think it’s much better for the health of the soil but also for a natural kind of pest control and you don’t tend to get overwhelmed with one pest from growing that way so I have put some other things in here as well I’ve got some Hol Hawks at the back which you can see here are just getting ready to flower for the first time after growing them from seed I’ve got some chard and some strawberries in the lower level some chamomile as well and a rubub plant too so happy jumble of things in here the poly tunnel was another structure that we needed to repair on moving in it did have a plastic sheet that was probably about 10 to 15 years old and had torn and become really badly damaged and just needed changing so we did that with the help of my mother-in-law and brother-in-law which was really really helpful I don’t think we could have done it on our own it was quite difficult getting the sheet over the top of the Arches but very much worth doing we love having the poly tunnel now so let’s go and take a look inside it’s really lovely and warm inside the poly tunnel but we are in the transitional stage now where I’m clearing out the spring things and getting the summer things in so you can see I’ve got a mulch down of homemade compost just to improve the soil and my young tomato plants have just been planted which is so exciting I love growing tomatoes I’ve still got a few broad beans in because these fix some nitrogen in the soil so they’ll make it better when I do plant things like tomatoes in here so we’re midway between the transition but it’s a really really amazing space and I absolutely love having a poly tunnel we recently installed an irrigation system which you can see on the soil below me so it Waters itself every 3 days and saves me trying to remember when I have and haven’t watered it so so far we are loving the irrigation system but summer I think will be the true test of how useful it is I like to leave a few things in here to go to seed to encourage the pollinators to come in and we get pollinators in here we get pests and then the birds come in and eat them the food chain kind of looks after the pests for us so you can see I’ve left a leak in that will have a really beautiful alium flower on the top um I’ve left some dill behind me which has these amazing yellow flowers on the top I absolutely love those and the other thing I do in here is I have a backbone of permanent plants to keep some structure in the soil I’ve got a dwarf cherry tree I’ve had a pomeg gramit bush but it didn’t do very well um a GOI berry bush a couple of lemon trees and some daers that stay in here permanently too so I’ll probably add a few more perennial and permanent plants and then the annuals come and go around them I got these bricks free from Facebook Marketplace someone was demolishing an old extension on their house and we drove them and then made the edging for the beds on either side with them and I think they’re really beautiful and I love that kind of find on Facebook Marketplace the trellises I’m using for climbing things so squashes cucumbers and also this grape that I started from a cutting I think I started this in 2020 so I haven’t had any fruit from it yet but maybe this year will be our year we are in our vegetable garden now and this is an area that we worked on throughout lockdown again it was something we did soon after moving in so we’ve got seven raised beds and most of these we use to grow perennial Foods we’ve got asparagus perennial kale Sun chokes perennial onions there’s some rhubarb some chives but there are a few vacancies for more perennial plants once I get my hands on some we’ve got some T breed and some grapes here as well we also have a comfrey hedge which we use for making homemade plant food and it’s also another thing the pollinators really love the path through the middle we made with flagstones that were from our house but were too damaged to keep as a floor um so we restored a new one in the house and then bought the old ones out here to use as a path we also put these arches over the middle and I’m currently training a rose and some clematitis to climb these and then another Rose behind me um but it’s taken Years cuz it’s a rose that I started from a cutting so it really was small you can see that the garden kind of descends into complete Wilderness As you move up through this part it’s not very manicured at all we’ve got long grass everywhere and then a kind of meadowy area that we leave long for most of the Year behind me um so that is the orchard we’ve got a cherry tree a fig tree a pear tree and an assortment of apple trees as well which is a really amazing thing to have especially as Autumn comes around and we get some fruit harvests from it but it’s beautiful this time of year because we get the cow parsley and lots of wild flowers and long Lush grass that the insects really really love so if you spend a bit of time in there you’ll see plenty of bees but it is very wild and one of the questions I get asked is how do you keep it looking tidy with it being a wild garden and if you watch these videos you’ll just know that I don’t it looks nice up until May and then after that it does go quite long and crispy but you can hear the um crickets and the other insects in there and it just makes it really really difficult to strim and I think it’s worth keeping some parts of the garden messy and letting the wildlife use it at the very top behind the orchard we also have another Wildlife Pond and some compost bins and that part of the garden is well and truly wild I haven’t had the time to look after it much at all so it is a little bit too overgrown and could use a bit more attention maybe I’ll get around to it one day um but we’ve got three big compost bins where we take our grass cuttings and any Garden waste and then I leave them for about a year and return them to the raised beds and I also compost in situ in these raised beds so I will add old vegetable plants and grass cuttings and then top them with a layer of compost and it will all gradually Infuse into the soil and build a really lovely rich soil to grow our food in but that is more or less our Cottage Garden as a complete tour for you I hope you’ve enjoyed having a look around and please do subscribe to our Channel if you’ve enjoyed um having a look around and we can show you what we’re up to over the coming months so thanks for watching and we’ll see you next time [Music]