Open Gardens 2020

This week we conclude our look around members’ gardens in 2020 featuring another “Virtual Open Garden” as part of our programme showing a different garden every week. This is because we can’t visit gardens in person due to Coronavirus. A new garden has been posted up on the web-site each Sunday for one week. To see the gardens featured previously, click on “Archives” and the tabs “September 2020”, “August 2020”, “July 2020” and “June 2020″ in the right hand panel to scroll through the earlier gardens. The owners of gardens that have been already been featured are:

• Carrie & Matt Lyons
• Colin & Diana Barber
• Glenys McDonald
• Lillian Taylor
• Alison & David Claridge
• Sir Keith and Lady Mills
• Judy & Bill Liddall
• Jean & John Tune
• Carole & Mike Marks
• Gill & Bill Long
• Gel Vivian
• John Perry

To see the garden photos in the best format click on the first picture below, which will open up the picture in full screen and then click through the photos using arrows to the right (sequence forward) and left (sequence back) of the screen.

Julie Watkins & Andy’s Garden is this weeks featured garden. Julie describes their garden as follows:

Our house and garden were new when we moved in over 40 years ago. My Dad used to stand in our then unfenced garden and direct the builders to tip all the rubble into garden further down!!!

We developed the garden in those early years with our daughters in mind. My Dad took over the ground behind the garage and used it as his ‘plot’ growing vegetables to show at the Tonbridge Garden Association. He also brought the blackcurrant bushes from his old allotment although sadly we no longer have these. There were always sweet peas and I still grow them every year and I was told that my maternal grandfather also grew them, so this is where my love of them came from. My daughter Suzy now grows them on her allotment, keeping up the family tradition.

In those early years the garden was mainly laid to lawn with small borders round the edge. When our youngest was 2 years old her grandparents bought her a Wendy House, which stood on the sight where the Summer House now stands.

The ‘plot’ was then reduced to about half the size. My dad continued to grow vegetables and won many prizes, one year he grew 50 onions to get 6 to show!

Andy took out 2 conifers to let more light in about 4 years ago and this area is now his domain. We grow potatoes, runner beans, beetroot, onions, lettuce, sweet corn, broad beans, radishes etc.

Three years ago I decided I wanted much larger herbaceous borders and increased the side and back borders by about 5 meters. By this time the conifers that had been planted along the boundary were starting to affect these borders. So when we came back from Mexico this year straight into lock-down we decided to remove these conifers. This has made a tremendous difference to the garden. Plants are appearing that had been previously dormant for years and shrubs are now growing from the back and growing more upright.

Last Autumn I dug out ‘new bed’, which allowed me to grow herbaceous plants, that wouldn’t survive in the back borders.

I hope you enjoy looking at my photos I took of my garden below: