The Discipline of a Small Garden Team

One of the questions we are most often asked by visitors to Oasis Cottage is whether we do all the work ourselves.

When we say yes, the response is usually much the same.

Oh my gosh. It must be so much hard work.

And it is. Particularly at this time of year, when five acres of garden are waking up at once, and we are preparing for another season of visitors.

But there is something missing from that response. We actually like working in the garden.

Perhaps not quite as hard as we are working at the moment, admittedly.

Just Staying Still Takes Work

Two of us look after Oasis Cottage: Laurie and me.

Between us, we do virtually everything. Planting, pruning, weeding, mowing, hedging, hard landscaping, repairing, building and maintaining the machinery and infrastructure that make a garden of this size possible.

We bring in an arborist once a year to review our mature trees and carry out specialist pruning, and a contractor with a very large machine tackles the enormous shelterbelt. Beyond that, it is essentially us.

Our jobs have divided themselves fairly naturally over the years.

Laurie does the hard landscaping, cuts the beech hedges and does the ride-on mowing. He plants the big trees, digs holes when my back is objecting, and seems to spend an alarming amount of time repairing machinery that I have broken.

Then there is the maintenance of the garden itself, and the maintenance required simply to make maintaining the garden possible. A nor'west damages the greenhouse; Laurie repairs it. A machine stops working; it needs fixing before the job it was being used for can continue.

We were talking about this recently when Laurie observed that maintaining the status quo takes quite a lot of work just to stay still.

He's right.

Designing for Five Acres

Having five acres hasn't fundamentally changed the way I like to garden. If this were a much smaller garden, though, I suspect there wouldn't be a weed in sight. I would probably also move plants around endlessly until I was satisfied with every last combination.

At Oasis Cottage, I've had to become a little more accepting.

But we have also found ways of making the scale manageable without compromising the way we want the garden to look.

Mass planting is one of them.

In the Princess Garden, hydrangeas, thujas, gaura, nepeta and Russian sage are planted in substantial groups. We are currently developing another area using rugosa roses en masse. Apart from the visual impact, planting this way makes maintenance considerably simpler than having isolated specimens scattered throughout the garden.

The same principle applies to the hard landscaping. We repeat materials throughout Oasis Cottage. It gives continuity from one garden area to another, but it also means we aren't maintaining a collection of different surfaces and materials, each requiring its own solution.

Some improvements are considerably less romantic.

I hate hoses.

Laurie has therefore installed retractable hose reels at strategic points around the garden. No dragging enormous lengths of hose behind me and, more importantly, no wrestling them back into coils afterwards.

Good garden design sometimes comes down to knowing exactly how much you dislike a hose.

The Things That Create Order

There are compromises I can make. Others I find much harder.

The grass needs to be mown. The edges need to be neat. The hedges need to look under control.

Years ago, we visited a very grand garden where its owner told us that if the lawns were mown and the edges and hedges were neat, you could get away with the weeds.

I think she was right.

Those strong, maintained elements give the garden order. When they begin to look scruffy, everything else seems to follow surprisingly quickly.

With five acres, however, something will always need doing. So we generally work outwards from the house. The areas we live with most closely come first, and they are also the areas visitors tend to see most. From there, we radiate out.

The weather has its say too. There is little point in stubbornly following a list when Canterbury has other plans for the day.

And before the garden opens for the season, we inevitably put in more hours than we would ideally like.

That makes the occasional day when we simply follow whatever takes our attention feel rather luxurious. Laurie calls it being in the flow.

I call it a treat.

The Right Tools for the Scale

Doing the work ourselves does not mean doing everything the hard way.

One of Laurie's particularly good investments was a 0.8-tonne digger. It cost about $13,000 and has earned its keep many times over. Hiring machinery every time we needed it would quickly have consumed the same amount, while owning it means it is there when a project—or an unexpectedly large hole—calls for it.

When I retired, one of my first purchases was a ride-on mower with a catcher. That, too, gets an enormous amount of use, as does my line trimmer, which gets so much use that repairing it has become another recurring item on Laurie's list.

There comes a point when the right machinery isn't an indulgence. It is what makes the work possible.

Made Here

Some of the things Laurie has built are now so settled into Oasis Cottage that visitors assume they have always been here.

Our 1898 house originally had a front veranda. Laurie looked at it and decided what it really needed was wrap-around verandas.

So he built them.

A new veranda now extends along each side of the house, complete with bullnose roofing, joining the original at the front. They look as though they belong to the house because that was the point.

That rather simple description disguises reinforced concrete, changing levels, pavers, uprights, roofing, guttering and a great deal of work.

Atelier Florale and its greenhouse came later. We bought two greenhouses, constructed them and joined them to create the larger greenhouse alongside the floral studio. Again, there were foundations, levels, paving and construction to contend with before there was ever a pretty vase of flowers sitting on the bench.

We enjoy making these things together. The work itself is part of the project.

Why We Still Do It Ourselves

I have tried having help in the garden.

At various times I've had people come in to lend a hand, and I discovered something about myself in the process: I don't particularly like having other people working in my garden.

That may sound contradictory, since we also choose to open Oasis Cottage to visitors, but the two feel quite different.

We enjoy welcoming people here and sharing the garden with them. But we are also private people, and home is where we like our quiet time.

For me, going out alone and working in the garden is part of having a garden. I don't want people around me all the time while I do it.

And Laurie and I genuinely enjoy tackling projects together.

We are getting slightly better at recognising our limits. Yesterday we worked for about eight hours doing hard physical jobs. Today has been cold and wet, and we have allowed ourselves to do very little.

On other days, three o'clock arrives, and we make ourselves stop, feed the dog and go inside to think about dinner.

It requires more discipline than you might imagine. Once you're absorbed in a job, stopping can be considerably harder than starting.

We know there may eventually come a time when we cannot do everything ourselves.

But for as long as we can, we will.

Because the work isn't something that happens in the background while we enjoy the garden.

The work is part of how we enjoy it.