September 2007 - Green Valley Design Sketch

The weather has been unusually warm these last weeks and it has been blissful to spend whole days outdoors. The wilderness is beginning to subside naturally as the days get shorter and I am beginning to think about what I want to do next year in terms of major landscaping. I have made a rough plan of the land on the back of piece of cardboard packaging. I can now look at my hard landscaping designs for the house, the barn, outbuildings, courtyard, driveway, field, woodland, terrace, front borders and vegetable gardens on a large scale, having sketched them all out with a bold felt pen using little green puffs for the positioning of trees and plants. In reality, I cannot imagine I will keep to my plans very strictly because I know that my ideas will evolve and develop the longer I spend at ‘Green Valley.’ Still, it is valuable to have put an outline design down on paper so I have a base to work around.

The design includes the creation of a good-sized naturalistic pond to the front of the farmhouse and a very large terrace, which will run the whole length of the house, to the south and west of the property. This means that a new containing wall will need to be constructed to support the terrace along the western side with a sloping gravel garden to the south. I want to make the existing herbaceous borders in the front much wider and plant a whole new colony of shrubs as a backdrop. The farmhouse will be clad in climbers to soften the severity of the grey stone, and I plan to commission a specially constructed trellis to support them, which will be roof high outside the kitchen. I also want to start maintaining the woods properly; not only by trimming back the trees so as to yield enough firewood for the winter, but also to bring more light into the dell beside the stream. I would then like to develop the whole area as a kind of ornamental woodland garden for growing all sorts of shade loving plants, such as rhododendrons, bluebells and lily-of-the-valley. There are already lots of evening primrose and wild red campion beside the path in the woods.

I am aware that there is enough land – just under five acres - to eventually be completely self-sufficient, especially since there is already a productive bore hole and a fast flowing stream running through the site. Since many of buildings are south facing, it would also be possible to put solar panels on the roof of the barn and part of the farmhouse, to provide a self-sustaining source of electricity and hot water in the future.