Someone I've only recently 'met' on LiveJournal posted about a most remarkable garden she'd been to near the Roman remains in Caerwent.

We've lived in south Wales since the mid-1980s, and had never heard of Dewstow Gardens, so one warm sunny afternoon we went over to see what we'd missed.

One word - WOW! A wonderfully eccentric gentleman (he must surely have been eccentric) had commissioned a garden, complete with odd-shaped ponds and underground grottoes. Filled in during the war so that the land could be used for agriculture, these gardens only came to light within the last however many years when the current owners set about extending the golf course. Can you imagine digging down in your garden and finding odd stairways and tunnels? The 'garden' isn't my idea of a garden of course - it's very 'country estate with parkland'. There are two 18-hole golf courses in the park already, so goodness knows what sort of 'expansion' the owners had in mind. Not that it matters: thankfully, when they realised what they'd got, they set about restoring the gardens and grottoes. It really is the most amazing place, and I'll be adding it to the list of local(ish) places to which visitors should be taken. It's about an hour's drive from here - and definitely well worth paying the entry fee.

There's a lot more to see than these photos suggest, but I ran out time to see it all. Next time you visit, let's hope these gardens are open. We'll explore the rest together  

On the way back from Imp08 (N Yorks) we called in to see Ann and the girls in Blackpool. Well OK, it wasn't exactly on the way - but it was well worth the detour  

This is what happens when you fail to notice that stuff has fallen down behind the washing machine - and that the washing machine has developed a leak... the result of which is being absorbed by said stuff. Whoops.

Fran's uncle Colin celebrated his 80th birthday in fine style, at Burnham Sailing Club, Burnham on Crouch, Essex.

The Coombs family decided to do the return journey in one day, and very sensibly let the train take the strain. This involved a drive to Lampeter the day before the party, to collect Robert from university, and then getting up at the ungodly hour of 03:00 (urgh) so that we could catch the 04:55 train from Cardiff to Paddington. Seven hours later we arrived at the sailing club, in time to shower and change, take some photos, eat, have fun catching up on family news - and then, in true 'Haynes manual' tradition, reverse the procedure (change, station, 7 hours travelling, sleep) before running Robert back to Lampeter the next day.

Are we still more than somewhat tired? Good grief, yes! But we all enjoyed the day, and would do it again. When's the next celebration?   

A ton is a big amount. I mean, it's VERY big. You know, a TON! It's biiiig! Except, that as I found out today, a ton of gravel is small. It's very small. And half a ton is even smaller. I think I need some more gravel.

The Hop Farm, Paddock Wood, Kent
August 9-13 2007

Where to start?

The weather was superb; the organisation by the local Imp Club was superb; the cars were superb; the people I met were superb. All in all, a superb weekend  

Most of the photos I took don't have captions, because I don't know whose cars I've pictured and I don't know who half the people are anyway.

After the main weekend was over I decided to explore the Hop Farm itself, believing that Nicholas (9) and Emily (7) should be able to learn a bit about the reasons for the Hop Farm's original existence and their mother's Kentish heritage. What we found was a glorified play area for children. Fine, except that it calls itself a Hop Farm. A place where once were grown hops for use in the brewing process. True, there are a few rows of wires with hops growing up them; however nowhere could I find anything to explain the whys and wherefores of how they were grown and used. There is a building which is supposed to house a museum of Kent: it was closed. There is supposed to be a museum of hops: it was either closed or very well hidden. The Hop Farm is a hop farm in name only, it seems. There were a few photographs on the walls in the tea room, but no explanations or demonstrations of hop growing or brewing.

The restaurant in the Hop Farm has a menu that is completely devoid of a vegetarian choice for children. When I queried this I was told "there's fish..." Fish, dear reader, is NOT VEGETARIAN. Nicholas and Emily had chips, because there was nothing else for them. They would not have wanted to join me with my roasted vegetables (because said vegetables were mainly chopped up peppers, which neither of them care for), and the only other alternative was a jacket potato. For goodness' sake! This place is in the heart of well-to-do Kent, where there are many people who don't eat meat or fish for various reasons. I have come to expect my local area of south Wales not to cater too well for vegetarians, because we are in the minority here. I do not expect it of somewhere in the heart of Kent where vegetarianism is fairly common. Does that sound a bit snobbish? I expect it does, but it is a fact that there are still too many places whose idea of a vegetarian choice for children is chips or jacket potato. Why? Do children not matter? Is it perfectly OK to offer them a choice of chips, chips or chips?

I still wanted to find something for the children - and for me - about hops and the traditions that go with them, so we headed to the gift shop. The gift shop is full of expensive rubbish, and completely devoid of anything relevant to hops.

In conclusion, the Hop Farm is a reasonable place to hold an event as long as contingency plans are able to be put into action. As a place to learn about hops and brewing it is a waste of space, and an expensive waste of space, at that.

I've called this collection 'part 3', but in fact it's more like part 5. Still, what's in a name? In an idea world I'd split the other Front Garden collection, but that requires tuits, and those are in short supply.

Anyway, I finally got round to putting some bark chippings down around the bit that's going to be a sort of patio. (So naturally, it rained. Sorry!) I think I used 7 x 40 litre sacks of bark, and it quickly became obvious that I'm going to need a heck of a lot more to cover the 'outside' bit of the garden. I'm tempted to see if a sawmill can supply some at cost rather than pay a fortune for nicely bagged up stuff from garden centres, because otherwise the whole project is going to have cost a heck of a lot more than I can sensibly afford. The bit in the middle, where the patio furniture is, is going to have a screed of concrete laid down to more or less (rather less than more probably) level it, and then I'm going to get some Welsh slate aggregate to put on top. At the moment there are flagstones in the middle - I'm undecided whether to keep them or to have them removed completely. I'll probably see what it looks like when I've got the slate down, and then make a decision based on whether or not I think the slate will be firm enough and level enough to support the table.

Phone call from mother - "What about the Garden festival at the weekend?" What indeed? So she came to stay, and we discovered Aberglasney gardens on the Saturday followed by the National Botanic Gardens (a rediscovery, this) on the Sunday. The predicted showers held off for the most part, and the children were well behaved. I know. Unexpected in the extreme!

Nick, a friend of Fran's from Beckenham, turned 50. To mark this achievement there was a bit of a party. Nick's friends from all over the place turned up - from work, from school, from Church... and thanks to some stunning weather a really good time was had by all.

Fran took some photos. These are they.

Ever since I sold my Imp back in 1980-something I'd regretted it, so when I got the chance to buy another one I jumped at it. Isn't she beautiful   

I've called her Imp y Celyn, after the Welsh Bard in Terry Pratchett's Soul Music. The only connection really is in the name, but of course she now lives in Wales, and judging by the amount of rain we usually get here this could easily be Llamedos. Celyn is Welsh for holly. In the TV series Red Dwarf the space ship is controlled (for want of a better word) by a computer called Holly. At one point in the series the crew met their counterparts from an alternative universe, and the alternative computer was called Hilly. Hilly, Hillman... OK, the connection is extremely tenuous, but it's the best I could do. Anyway, Imp y Celyn it is, aka Celyn. And she's mine, all mine  ))

The original plan was to remove the railings next to the gate; remove the concrete mess atop the stone wall and drive the digger into the garden straight from the trailer over the top of the coping stones on top of the dressed stone. The next stage would have been to excavate behind the wall to relieve pressure on it, removing as much soil and rubbish as was necessary to lower the overall height of the garden by about two foot. It all seemed pretty simple, but... we'd all reckoned without the wall itself, which had other ideas and was determined to have its own way   

So - the whole wall had to come down, displacing the rats who had taken up residence behind it (oh dear, what a shame) and also displacing the shrubbery which was something we'd been hoping to avoid. It was an interesting day, as you can see.

A few weeks later, and it dawned on us that if we were going to build a concrete block wall behind the level of the original stone one we would need to have some more of the garden removed. These are the photographs referenced with 'pt2-##'. The gas pipe gave us some heart-stopping moments as the side wall threatened several times to collapse on it (which would have broken it, sending gas everywhere), but in the end the wonderful men from Orchard succeeded in removing everything above the original level of the land sans mishap. Now all we have to do is to tidy and clean up the house, so that we can have a sheddi wallmolishingmoot...


Fit the third - photos referenced pt3-##:
Eventually we gave in and commissioned Dave-from-across-the-valley to build a proper wall for us. We decided we'd have it in ordinary concrete block, with a straightforward render to hide the concrete blockedness. Some nice new red bricks would be used for the pillars, and the original name brick and coping stones would be put back where they belong. Once work started it didn't take long. This turned out to be just as well, because Dave-from-etc had only just finished the work when it snowed. And boy, did it snow. Schools were closed for two days and roads were impassable. Of course, this being the UK the snow cleared almost as fast as it had come...

There was a gap of nothing much happening, and then fit the fourth happened. Fran decided she wanted a garden. So, off to the appropriate place for some of that semi-permeable membrane to cover the expanse of mud in front of the house. Fran also bought a trio of cherry trees (vertical twigs) and some other stuff, including some bark chips. Sooner or later it is hoped that a garden will rise, phoenix-like from the uneven pile of mud...