Bluebell Cottage, five years on. Part One...

Five years ago today a large removal van pulled away from outside our old, rambling Victorian house with all our worldly goods inside and drove 20 miles south down the A49 to Bluebell Cottage. We followed behind with two cats and one daughter (we dropped the other daughter off at Uni to save space) and attempted to squash our belongings in through the charmingly bolt-studded front door. As cottages go, it isn't tiny - it was once home to at least three labourers and their large families. Their confined, cold lives here are unimaginable.  But for a family of four twenty-first century adults with a lifetime of accumulation, scaling down to two and half bedrooms was more than a little tricky. Half of our stuff had been dropped off at charity shops in Warrington in the months before, but we still put much of it into the garage here in boxes. Some of it is still there.

It felt then, and almost certain was, an act of madness. I still occasionally wake up sweating, remembering that we hadn't completed on our old house and that we bought this place on a self-certified mortgage - effectively a wing, a prayer and a couple of optimistic signatures. We could only have afforded the double mortgage for about six months before we ran out of cash. We were lucky.

But we weren't buying a house. We were buying a new life for us all and a new career for me -  a plant nursery, a 2 acre garden open to the public for six months of the year, a meadow and a lovely little piece of woodland. There happened to be a house on it. Fixing up the house could wait - we had higher priorities.

But nothing much had been done in the nursery or garden since the For Sale sign went up in August 2006. Ten thousand unsold plants sat rooted into the gravel, riddled with hairy bittercress and liverwort, draped with the dead remnants of the previous summer's growth. Many had not been potted on for two years and were splitting their pots with roots desperate for escape.

The large back polytunnel was full of wide, high raised benches - so high that I couldn't reach the middle without a stepladder - and packed tight with barely alive plants. Somewhat disturbingly the benches were covered in a polythene wrap of bacon packaging.

Naturally, no new plants had been ordered for spring delivery. The greenhouses were stuffed with trays of dead cuttings and seedlings. And of course, I also hadn't the first clue what half the remaining plants were, let alone how to grow them. My training for this job was 20 years of weekend hobbyist gardening, one day a week for a one year at Reaseheath College and too many years sitting in an office. I had a lot to learn.

The garden too had been left to its own devices since the previous summer. Almost two acres of mixed borders needed a massive clear up exercise before visitors could be let in. And I had almost no idea what was underneath all that dead top growth.

 

Some horrors needed no uncovering. These plastic gems were in a little woodland corner in the garden.

A few weeks - or even months of run-up time would have helped, but the nursery was listed in the RHS Plant Finder as opening to the public on the 17th March - three weeks after we moved in.  And the garden was due to open for the National Garden Scheme on the 26th April. The great, the good and the curious of Cheshire would be dropping into to admire our beds of weeds, dead perennials and clogged up ponds in 8 weeks time.

To be frank, those first few weeks were not the best of times. Of course everyone rallied round. Dave helped out at weekends, family members mucked in, I contacted the staff who'd been sent home in September and they came in and did everything they could. We hauled out weeds, swept paths, threw away dead plants, ripped up rotten carpet tiles, re-felted roofs, cut back a year's worth of unkempt growth in the garden and tried to organise and label the remaining stock. We hid trays of weed-ridden plants stuff behind the sheds, roped off tunnels full of near-dead plants and opened a presentable looking nursery on 17th March 2007.

Five weeks later we opened for the National Garden Scheme. The sun shone and 130 people turned up, nodded approvingly and ate all the cake.

I stood at the entrance on that first NGS day in the spring sunshine, clean, smart-ish and sporting an exhaustedly weak smile. I clearly recall so many people told me what an idyllic life I now had and how lovely it must be to be here. I think I said wearily, 'ask me again in a few years'. 

Part 2 coming up in a day or two....