Harrells Hardy Plants
The home of rare and unusual
Hardy Perennials
A New
Enterprise (or Momentary Madness)
Have you ever wondered about your own sanity? I did when I
first surveyed an acre of uncultivated, weed infested ground and realised that I
had just bought the Evesham custom lease to it, in partnership with my equally
insane sister Liz.
It had seemed such a good idea -well, perhaps more like a
dream come true- when we had been offered the land. Just think, an acre of land
(with two greenhouses!) to lay the
foundations of a nursery which we could develop as a retirement project. Like
Stalin, we had a Five-Year Plan.
We looked around the place before signing on the dotted
line, but we sort of looked at it and saw lots of SPACE. (You have to garden in a tiny plot to appreciate what I
mean). It was a dry sunny-ish day in late February and we had a guided tour by
the outgoing tenant. We stood at the end of the greenhouse with glass in it and
stared out at the sloping land and….sort of …lost our minds. “We’ll take
it”
The plot, reached by a lane handily sited almost
equidistant between our two homes, consisted of a large wooden shed, ten rows of
very old and very large gooseberry bushes and the aforementioned two
greenhouses, one being 100 ft x 15 ft, glassless except for pieces of jagged
broken glass along the sides. There were rows of dead stalks from last years
runner bean crop suspended down the entire length on green nylon string and the
whole length of the greenhouse floor was infested with knee-high weeds.
Greenhouse 2 being 60ft x 20ft was filled with tins of nails, tools in boxes,
bits of wood, pieces of tin and angle iron, frames of greenhouse windows,
(without any glass), two old cast iron baths, a pair of wheelbarrow bodies,
buckets of STUFF that smelt like chemicals, a mountain of cardboard fruit trays,
rusting spades and forks…didn’t that man throw anything away?
Outside there were two more old baths acting as water
butts, two very elderly and frail chicken houses masquerading as sheds and
finally the remaining acreage which sloped fairly steeply down towards the river
meadows separated from them by a narrow band of trees and a hedge.
Now, friends, I realise you are all shaking your heads and
thinking what naïve fools we were. Well, you’re wrong – and yet you’re
right……..
……. the
first thing we discovered was, that when it rained, both greenhouses leaked.
Now, it was to be expected in the one without a roof, but the glazed one? Yes
the glazed one let in more water than the open one! It poured in through the
spans and pitter-pattered through every little nook and cranny and that’s when
we realised why there was so much moss under the spans!
However we did have SPACE!
We began to fill the glassless greenhouse with our seedlings and all the bits
and pieces of plant life that had previously been shoehorned into our respective
gardens, greenhouses and windowsills. They began to trickle into all that SPACE
and were joined by more and more plants, the trickle become a river and then a
torrent, as, like caged birds suddenly released, Liz and I realised we had room
to sow anything and everything. We sowed vegetable crops galore, anything and
everything we had ever dreamt of.. Oh and incidentally, we discovered that
although our land was only 20 foot away from the end of Liz’s rich black loam
garden soil, our soil was nearly all solid clay!
Easter arrived with its torrential rain and venturing
onto the ground become like a Tarzan adventure. Wellies stuck as if they had
been cemented in, or else grew to twice their size by being coated in wet clay-
we struggled on, pricking out seedlings potting on last years babies and
checking through catalogues to compare the price of Mypex, pots, labels etc. We
weeded the glassed greenhouse and stuck every watertight receptacle we could
find under the leaks. We weeded the open greenhouse, just the first 25 foot,
then another 25 foot and finally the lot! Liz’s husband, David replaced all
the jagged glass with single panes, at ground level only since the wooden
framework was to rotten to support the weight of glass higher up! Looking down
the length of it, we wondered how we would ever fill it all with plants. We
looked out across the empty sweep of ground beyond the greenhouses and wondered
if we would ever be
able to plant it all up…. Had we taken on too much?…….. Well watch
this space!!
Kate Phillips
Weeds,
Weevils, Woodworm and Winds
Part
2 of an ongoing saga
We
take up the story in September 2000, as Liz and I tentatively dipped our toes
into the world of horticultural entrepreneurialism.
That
summer had seen us expanding our stock beds and keeping our plants well potted,
whilst dreaming of bigger things. Only about one eighth of our total acreage was
actually in cultivation
We
had asked the Electricity Company to connect us in April. Now here is where we
stumbled upon the fatal flaw in our plan, the electricity company needed the
address and postcode of the property where the supply was to be connected .The
large field overlooking the river Avon, now called Harrell’s Hardy Plants,
didn’t have an address or postcode. We told them. Then we told them again. And
again. And again. In desperation we
invented an address for the little lane that connects us with Rudge Road and
grafted on Liz’s postcode. Then, with all the assurance of a good con-artist,
I phoned them, passed on our address and postcode and we had our very own
electricity supply within eight weeks which was pretty swift considering this
was now September and we’d been waiting for four months already.
In
late autumn our plants, which now completely filled the 120 foot by 16 foot
glassless greenhouse, were abandoned to their fates. We moved indoors to study
seed catalogues and greenhouse brochures.
The
development of Harrell’s Hardy Plants continued quite rapidly in 2001. We
dismantled the glassless greenhouse, which, if you have been concentrating, you
will remember contained our entire plant stock. So in the Easter holidays the
entire Harrell clan descended on the nursery to carry trays, boxes and, in the
end, just any old container of pots of plants out of the doomed greenhouse and
onto the lovely new sales area we had made for them. The greenhouse duly
stripped down to metal poles and wooden posts was removed and replaced by a
spanking new greenhouse.
My
daughter painted the flaking green shed a rather splendid shade of dark blue and
Liz’s son removed 60 overgrown gooseberry bushes with a brushwood cutter and
heroic effort. The rose arch went up at the entrance to the display beds and
“Emily Gray” is well on her way up it. The bog garden was completed and the
pond nearly so.
We
have solved a potential problem with vine weevils by watering in nematodes, and
the weed problem was solved by covering them with carpet. As for the wind that
sweeps in from the west with great regularity and the woodworm that infested the
old greenhouse……well we solved those problems eventually. In late autumn
2001 we had the wooden greenhouse dismantled at vast expense and in late summer
2002 we surrounded our ever-growing plant sales area with wonderful Para-web
which doesn’t keep out the wind but filters it.
Nurseries
are never trouble free, what was our next challenge?
…………. watch this space.
Sunday,
12th June was The Big Day at Harrell’s Hardy Plants when we opened our nursery
gardens to visitors in aid of St. Richards New Building Hospice Appeal, raising
£289 on the day.
People
were very interested in the gardens; the planting and the design all drawing
many favourable comments. We got to talk plants, plants and plants with others
as fascinated by them as we are. Who could ask for anything better!!
The
whole day was filmed by our faithful shadows! – Alexis and Greg, who blended
into the scenery. Just look!
We
have had 5 months to get used to the camera recording our thoughts and deeds.
It
all began when we volunteered to share our experiences of taking on new careers
late in life with a film production company. On an exceedingly bleak day in
January we showed a film crew around our nursery, with nothing to see but bare
earth and a few dead stalks. Since then they have become regular visitors,
faithfully recording our daily lives. They will be filming until September, then
the film will be edited over the following 3 months and the finished film of our
adventures, along with those of several other people around the U.K. will be
screened as a series by Channel 4 sometime in 2006, we are told.
We’ll
keep you posted.
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