🌳 20 Years of Gardening: You Won’t Believe The Difference!

Hi everyone, Gillette here, enthusiastic gardener. Welcome back to my garden. And we are in Essics, England at the beginning of November and joined by the one and the only Mr. Unenthusiastic gardener himself, Richard. >> Yes. Oh, welcome. Welcome. >> Welcome to our garden. >> Yes. >> You've seen it a few times. you have. But what you haven't seen is what we are about to show you next. >> We watched this last night. It's a video montage of our garden over the past 33 years. >> We've been in this house for 20. >> Oh, yes. >> And we show you. We don't have very many pictures of our previous garden. >> No, we don't. >> Because back in the day, we didn't have phones. We didn't have instant picture access, did we? >> No. internet. >> We didn't even have computers when we moved back in that house in 1988. >> Um, >> yeah. >> 88 we moved into that house >> and we moved here in 2005. So, there were no computers. You couldn't just snap pictures of your houses and your gardens and and we Well, we'll show you the ones that we do. >> Yes. Well, what do you think of when you watched the montage of this garden of what it looked like? >> It looked lovely with a nice big lawn. >> It did. It did. >> I mean, my only job was to cut the lawn. >> Yeah. >> And that was taken away from me. >> And once that was taken away, my enthusiasm for the garden went >> and he became >> the unenthusiastic. >> The unenthusiastic gardener. >> Yes. I was just done away with. wasn't needed. >> So anyway, you'll see all the changes over the years. >> Yes. >> How the garden has m matured, >> how it's >> how we've matured, >> and how Janette's changed. >> Not necessarily for the better. >> Without further ado, before you get yourself dug into a deeper hole than you already are, >> here's our garden. >> Enjoy. First of all, we're going back 33 years to the house we lived in before our bungalow now, and I had no gardening experience, but I started off with conifers, and I think I liked them because of the different colors and the different textures. You can see we had a pond in this garden, which was quickly filled in, but this garden was huge. It was 120 foot long and I didn't know what I was doing. We divided it in half with this trellis and I just concentrated on the half nearer to the house. But there used to be a swimming pool and this was the swimming pool slide which actually never got removed. It stayed here all the time. And the first thing we did was build a raised pond with a pergola because we had a lot of koi. But we didn't realize how quickly koi grew. And this was our first little dog called Freddy. Freddy was adorable. We ended up with four bishons in this house. There's another picture of the pond and you can see the conifers have already grown a lot bigger in the background. Well, as I say, the koi grew so big, we had to dig out and make a new pond, which was lovely. It had waterfalls and everything. And then our other three dogs were Bolan, George, and Lulu. And here they all are here. Happy memories. We took away the raised pond, made this deck in. And here's a view of the garden just before we moved. As I say, it was 120 foot long, very shady, very beautiful. Now we are in the garden where we live now. All these years back and it looks very peaceful. All this lawn, but the hardscaping was old crazy paving, all crumbling, little brick walls. But it does look very nice with the lawn, I must say. So, we have a lot more patio now as you'll see. This is container garden. And there used to be a raised pond there. So, you can see the little brick walls, the little um patios. And here's a view of the oak tree, which was pretty much right outside the back door. It cost so much shade. It really did. And the leaves. Oh my goodness. So, I think I have leaves now, but and acorns as well. Acorns everywhere. We had a little brick barbecue. That area over in the right hand corner, that's shady corner. Now, we're back to container garden area. If you're familiar with the names, I call them what I call them now, just for ease really. That's the oak tree. You'll see the oak tree has gone very soon. We had to take it down unfortunately. There it is. It's gone. Looks a little bleak. That's when we first had Lotty and Lucy. You can tell how tiny they are. And they used to race around this garden chasing each other. They were just hilarious. But they also used to dig holes in the lawn all the time. Those are raised beds and I did plant in them at some stages, but as I say, they were crumbling down and you'll see soon that I took them out. The rose on the right is my unknown rose. That is pretty much I think the only plant from the original garden that I still have. You can see on the right hand side the tiny mahonia which is now huge. Now you can see that I've started planting in container garden and planting around in the other areas as well. You can see the cat. I bought the cat at a boot sale and he was a bargain. And here I've wrapped some fairy lights around the one of the trees. Trees no longer there. There used to be a pond here, a raised pond which we removed. And you can see the old paving which as I say was crazy paving. That's a picture along the actual house. And the raised beds there, you can see them a little bit more clearly and I'll zoom in a bit. And I decided to take them down, but I left a footprint and I just filled it up with some uh some chipping stones trying to make it look pretty. painting benches. The blue containers are the ones that are now along Shady Corner and they have the ferns in, but they were there for a while first of all. Here's where I decided to do a little bit of garden design. And I did a topery out of a conifer. And then of course I got some blue paint. And you can see everything for some reason starts to get painted blue. And I had these lovely, it was beautiful tortoise. and it got stolen. Someone came in my garden and stole my tortoise. Here we've decided to add the cabin. So, you can see the base layer of concrete and it went up in one day. We didn't put it up. The installers did it. They did it one day. And there it is. In the next picture, we are starting to mark out where the patio, the new hardscaping will be. So that's that line there. And now I'm going to show you a picture of Google Earth. This is a picture of later than this time, but you can actually see how much patio there is. You'd be surprised. There's not actually as much garden as you think when you see it from a distance from up above. It's quite interesting to see. It's really good actually. If you want to see your property, just go on Google Earth. You can take pictures. And that's the cabin with the white roof. And here we have had all the hardscaping done. It was just so lovely. And it was from this point that I decided to start the YouTube channel. And you can see my interest as soon as we had the hardscape, my interest grew and the planting began. Now, here's the lawn. The lawn was complete lawn, but you'll see that I started to steal bits of the lawn and make it into flower beds. And once I'd started, you'll see I couldn't resist. I'd added some stepping stones on this part. So, it does look nice with just the lawn, I must say. But the dogs, as you can see, when you've got girl dogs, they do start making brown patches everywhere. This is me. I think I'm deciding. Shall I? Or shant I? Yes. Let's steal a bit of the garden and make some more borders. And here you can see that I've stolen a bit and I've planted it. And then here's a picture from another angle of the planting. And yes, I've taken some more. So we had the whole edge which was now border. The grass was suffering so much. I tried so hard with this grass. You'll see later on the lengths that I did go to. And here I've decided I'm having a circle lawn and I cut all the all the turf away by hand. I wouldn't do that now. I'd do the cardboard method, but I gave myself far more work than I needed to really. You can see the state of the grass. It's just very poor quality. But I now have a circle garden and I've just beginning to plant it here. And stepping stones. Yes, I liked this. It looked very nice, I thought. So, we had stepping stones going all the way from shady corner across, and it did look nice. And here's a view from the other direction. Now, the next pictures are the lengths I went to to try and save the lawn. I seeded the lawn. I put crisscross strings with silver foil everywhere to try and stop the birds from eating all the seed. I watered it religiously but in the end we thought no let's get artificial lawn. So we had this wonderful man come and he took up all the grass and you can see these following few pictures. He's laying all his membranes and all the base layers or all that stuff to put a new artificial lawn in. and we absolutely loved it. It's one of the best purchases we've made. We've had it now for about four years. It's just wonderful. It's only a tiny area and I know it's not for everyone. Here's some pictures of the garden. And you can see a lot more plants have been added by now. And we've got some wintry pictures here. And we had snow this year. Next, we're into another year. We can see all the beautiful tulips and daffodils and the flamingos. You'll see them popping up here and there. You'll see them moving all around the garden. Next was a fun project. I decided let's have carnival corner and we hang the carnival bunting and you can see the flamingos were moved here. Bunting all over. It was wonderful. It was such fun. It only lasted a year or so because the material started to fray and bits kind of fell down. But for a while it was a lot of fun. Another year more beautiful tulips. This is why it's so important to plant those bulbs because they look gorgeous. And then we had a year of labelia. The blue leilia around the edge was beautiful. I had to add this picture because the sunset this evening was spectacular. Now, we added a pond. Oh, I had to persuade Richard to add this pond. He was not keen on this idea, but I wanted a wildlife pond. And here it is, my beautiful wildlife pond. Then I had the idea that we needed to add a hibernaculum next to the wildlife pond. So this is me digging a hole, creating all these underground tunnels, and then covering it over And then you wouldn't even know that it was there. Here's some pictures of the evening. And those balls were lampshades that were in my bedroom. And I just added some solar fairy lights from Amazon. And I haven't had them out all this year. I must add them because they are so pretty. And then of course we had the raised pond which was built in one day from Blackden. Then we're back to this summer. And this is what the garden looked like this summer. I've enjoyed every minute of my garden. [Music] Oh, [Music] hey. Heat. [Music] [Music] Heat. [Music] Heat. Heat. [Music] Heat. Heat. [Music] [Music] Heat. [Music] [Music] Heat. [Music] Heat. Heat. [Music] Hey, hey, hey. [Music] [Music] Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat. [Music] [Music] [Music] Heat. Hey, heat. Hey, heat. [Music] And here you can see our solar water feature has been stolen last night from the pond. Probably a fox. And this is what I found this morning. We hope you enjoyed that video, seeing how our garden has changed over the years. Thank you so much for watching. We will see you again in December before Christmas. >> Yes. And there will be a Christmas video. Yes. >> Of some sorts. >> Of some sorts. >> Who knows? >> We might do a Q&A. Yes. >> If you want to ask us anything at all, please leave your questions in the comment section of this video. We will answer anything. almost anything. >> Anything. >> Take care everyone. I'm Janette. I'm the enthusiastic gardener. >> And I am Richard the unenthusiastic gardener. Thank you for watching. >> Bye.