From Patch of Grass to French Garden: Creating Mine on a Budget

If there was ever a piece of writing that might convince you to buy the ugliest house and garden you could imagine, this is it.

The garden before I arrived, there was potential in there somewhere…

My lovely old stone house really wasn’t one of Cinderella’s ugly sisters. It was both of them rolled into one.

I’ll never forget the day I arrived to look at the house. The power had been cut off, so I essentially spent the first five minutes of the viewing in the dark. It smelt awfully sad inside too, but more about the house another day.

Because, as a country girl, it was actually the garden that upset me most.

In a relatively small outdoor space of only a couple of hundred square metres, there was nothing but everything that shouldn’t have been there. And by that I mean bamboo, which was taking over like there was no tomorrow, and huge conifer hedging that not only kept the garden in permanent shade, but the house too.

Unfortunately for my family and my bank manager, I am incapable of waking up in a French country house without wanting a beautiful view from the front door.

I didn’t have a huge landscaping budget, so the garden has evolved slowly. A pot here, an arch there, something found second-hand, something painted rather than replaced, and plants moved because I’d obviously put them in the wrong place the first time…

And little by little, it has started to become the garden I could see in my head from the beginning.

Let there be light…

The first job absolutely had to be getting rid of that bamboo. I got a local gardener in who decided it was a fantastic idea to burn the forever-renewing shoots away. Whilst this did work a bit, he also burnt the tops of my topiary trees and sadly they never really recovered.

This got the ball rolling, as it were, but it has actually taken me five years to get rid of the bamboo entirely. Please do take that as a tip if you are considering buying a house with bamboo in the wrong place!

Next, the hedges. Gone.

And just like that, not only was the garden at least a third bigger, but the sun flowed in and began to nourish some of the little forgotten plants and flowers that had been hiding away, eclipsed for so long.

The house became almost unrecognisably brighter too. I painted the underside of the porch to help with that, and suddenly everything felt different.

Then, with the following spring, came the tiny violets, the four o’clock sweethearts that smelt wonderfully like Parma violets, and some cheap dahlias that are literally the best plants ever for even the worst waterer in the world.

Starting over

Septic tank apocalypse, overplanting, starting again, olives going into the ground.

Unfortunately, I did overplant a little to make up for the complete lack of botanical joy in the beginning, and my small garden soon began to feel rather overrun.

Then I had to replace the septic tank.

This involved digging everything up.

Everything.

So I started again, clinging on to the plants that had been saved and taking the opportunity to get some of those potted olive trees into the ground where they belonged.

And perhaps the second attempt was better for it. I knew the garden by then. I knew where the sun fell, where I naturally wanted to sit, which plants could cope with my somewhat relaxed approach to watering, and which bits of the garden I wanted to see when I opened the door in the morning.

I also knew I didn’t need to spend a fortune.

Old things could be painted. Plants could be moved. Cuttings could become new plants. A simple gravel path could completely change the way you walked through the garden. An inexpensive arch could create a destination where previously there was just another bit of grass.

And slowly, it became mine.

My little French garden today

Today, it is my pride and joy.

It’s still changing, of course. I don’t think I’ll ever consider it finished, and I’m not sure I’d ever want it to be.

It’s my humble but pretty little place to drink a coffee and listen to the morning chorus, potter about with another idea I probably don’t need, or sit outside in the evening and watch the bats and owls flying through the night sky.

It isn’t an enormous landscaped garden and it certainly wasn’t created with an enormous landscaping budget.

Five years ago, it was bamboo, conifers and a patch of grass.

And perhaps that’s my favourite thing about it.

Because when I look out of the door now, I can finally see the garden that was in my head all along.

Katie x