Men and machinery.

While I was busy drawing sketches of ideas for the design of the front garden, my husband and our boys stood huddled together watching the JCB in action. In the same way as a stoat mesmerises a rabbit, their heads would follow the digger, as it scooped out bucket-load after bucket-load, carving out a huge crater, while leaving behind a mountain of soil.

As the morning wore on, the noisy drone of the digger reached the village, whereupon an old man came sauntering along the road, leaned against the boundary wall, obviously fascinated by the whole procedure, and made enquiries as to whether we were building a swimming pool. When told it was for a pond for wildlife, he looked at us, aghast, as if we were insane, and asked why we had not thought of saving ourselves all this trouble by just sowing grass like everyone else.

Later in the day, when the digger had completed its task of creating the second crater and mountain of soil in the back garden, I'm sure I detected misty-eyed expressions, as it went up the drive. But the moment soon passed, as my husband's gaze turned from the digger to fix upon the various mountains of weeds, small stones, boulders, and now two more, of soil. But, being a conservationist, I had plans for all of them.

The Artesian Well

The importance of knowing the exact location of the water and electricity supplies to one's home, cannot be stressed enough. To suddenly find you have no electricity, and an artesian well flooding your front garden, is not the best start to the day. The owner of the JCB had an unforgettable experience to tell his family round the dinner-table, the day he struck, not one, but both of our services.

To be fair to him, it was not his fault, since neither he, nor we, knew of their exact location. As luck would have it, he was also one of the local farmers, and able to find among his great store of implements, the magic key to turn off the water supply at the mains in the nick of time, before the flood reached our house, and turned it into a swimming pool. Having local knowledge, he was also able to locate an electrician, who, after having a good laugh to himself, re-located the electricity cable away from the proposed area for the actual pond .

"That was a great pond, Mum! Pity it's all gone!", quipped one of our sons, as he looked out of his bedroom window early the next morning, only to discover there was no sign of the water. Thank goodness for that, we thought, pleased at the realisation we had free-draining soil. But, it slowly dawned on us that we would need to buy a large amount of butyl to line both ponds, to the tune of £1000.

Eureka! Buried Treasure.

There was so much bending and twisting involved in clearing the land of weeds, that whenever I straightened my back, I felt that the invisible hinge there needed oiling. My husband, on the other hand, had devised a method of kneeling on a piece of old carpet, and slicing off the top layer of weed with a spade, as he went along. To this day, I don't know how he managed it, but he had no back-ache, so there was something positive in all his efforts.

The days soon fell into a pattern; a shower to start the day and ease the stiffness in our bones, and hot, relaxing baths when we felt we'd had enough of the digging and forking, and loading of the barrow. We also stopped to admire any treasure that surfaced, after having been buried in the soil, for goodness knows how many years. We soon amassed a collection of broken china, all kinds of bottles, and best of all, thirteen troughs, which I would share with my family, before planting them up.

Thanks to the division of labour, we arrived, sooner than anticipated, at the excavation of the ponds. Common sense told us we would need to hire a JCB to remove the soil, since we wanted the area of the ponds to be approximately 25 feet by 34 feet for the front, and 25 feet by 25 feet for the back.

Teamwork.

The advantage of clearing a quarter of an acre of pernicious weeds such as couch grass, creeping thistles, nettles, dandelions and ground-elder, is that you grow visible muscles where previously there had been none. The downside is that my husband and I began to have the physical characteristics of He-Man and She-Ra.

All this physical work in the fresh air also gave us insatiable appetites, as well as many weeks of back-breaking toil. No sooner had we cleared an area of weed, when a new flux of dormant seed started to germinate. And we now had a mountain of weed, and two more, of little stones and enormous boulders.

Since we all wanted this wildlife garden, delegation was required to maintain sanity. With the promise of a trip to Alton Towers and other away-day treats, we enlisted the help of Number One Son to push the heavy-laden wheelbarrow loads to the weed and boulder mountains. It fell to Number Two Son ( in between being riveted to the tennis, golf, football season) to take on the onerous task of feeding the hungry horde.

Getting Started

Our previous home, which we'd lived in for a little over nineteen years, had had a postage stamp of a garden to the front and one the size of a rectangular postage stamp to the rear. Once established, I had enjoyed pottering about in them, because the relatively small amount of maintenance involved allowed me to devote the majority of my time to our two young sons. My husband's contribution to that garden had been to help me choose the plants for it and then to use it for the recreational purposes of reading or sunbathing. I was the keen, amateur gardener.

The area of our new plot was just under half an acre; the area which was to become our new garden, half that again. To say that my husband found the idea of helping to clear a quarter of an acre of weeds and rubble, using only a spade and a fork, quite daunting, was a bit of an understatement. But the idea of making not one, but two ponds left him speechless.

After a visit to the library we came home with an armful of information about how to "create a garden pond, the easy way". Meanwhile, armed with a length of washing line and a garden hose, I was dividing my time between laying out the shape of the ponds and trying to identify the kinds of lichen on the stane-dyke wall at the back of the house.

Creating the wildlife ponds

There was great excitement when my husband and I, and our two sons drove down the old track towards the bungalow, which was to become our new home. It was virgin territory as far as we were concerned. I remember clearly being asked, "What vision do you have for this pile of weeds?", and replying, "a garden for wildlife". I was the keen, amateur gardener, you see, but we were all involved, one way or another, in the creation of the wildlife garden.

Cutting grass had always involved an element of misery for me, as I'd be sneezing afterwards, for days at a time. I'd never found grass very interesting to look at anyway, and pristine lawns with manicured edges seemed a waste of time and energy. They seemed to have an invisible sign saying, "keep off the grass". I'd always preferred the ones with daisies, much prettier by far. So I knew from the beginning we would have ponds instead of lawns, one at the front of the house and the other at the rear.

A Year In Pictures At Barleycorn

Sixteen years ago, our family drove past a piece of wilderness, a corner of a farmer's field. It had a fair amount of builder's rubble, nettles, creeping thistles, and masses of couch grass. There was an old building with a tin roof on the site and a newly completed bungalow ... and a "For Sale" sign. I fell in love with the old building and the size of the wilderness area, and right there and then we decided to buy it. Shortly afterwards, we began our garden for wildlife, which I want to share with you. We have two resident cats, called Jaffa and Monster, who try to keep the mice from our loft, and, at the moment, two strays who live in the old building.