Not very pretty. A gas meter without a front, a side border that is one great thorn, and a pointless bit of grass. hmm

This weekend I started tackling the front garden. Not the most obvious place to start perhaps, given the great, unkempt expanse at the rear of the house crying out for a fork, spade and quite possibly a chainsaw. But while the evenings stay dark and dank, any work in the back garden remains basically invisible during the week – and when I trail home from the office in the evening and step out the door in the morning, I want to be able to make out a garden beginning to take shape; to smell the newly-dug earth and glimpse small green shoots poking through it.

There are, of course, other more practical reasons too. Most pressingly, the front of our house – even if you were being kind – could not at the moment be described as having kerb appeal: our 1980s windows have ugly aluminium frames; our front door could serve as a tutorial in bad taste with its peeling orange varnish and central glass panel. When the house was built, 101 years ago, as part of the world’s first Garden City (more of which later) the windows would have been divided with glazing bars to give a cottagey feel, the front door would have had been half-glazed with nine panes above the letterbox, and the house’s render would have been bright and white, rather than decidedly flakey. Give us a couple of years and the restoration will be complete – but for now, hopefully lush planting can help to soften the exterior and hide its imperfections.

So here’s what we have to begin with. If you stand on the doorstep with your back to the house, on your right is our concrete garden path leading down to the street; running alongside it,  in front of you, is a bed about one stride wide that’s currently grassed over. On the very far left is a bed with two rose trees, what I think (hope) is a clematis, and a great deal of scratchy bush and prickly bramble as if the previous owners had been very cross and planted a border to match their mood. And in the middle section of our garden there’s a block-paved parking space and, between the parking space and the window, a patch of lawn.

I have never, ever, understood the British love of tiny front-garden lawns. To me, grass is there as a lush green carpet on which to laze in the summer, and if you’re not going to sit on it, you ought to get rid of it. And so began a Sunday of, what I can quite confidently say, was the most extreme gardening I’ve ever done – imagine hand-ploughing a quagmire untouched for a decade or more, and you’re close to understanding how broken my body was on Monday morning.

I started by dividing and removing the turf to reveal the soil below. The good news? We have a lot of worms in our garden. The bad news? Our soil appears to be really heavy clay – although I’m hoping that 10 years plus of non-cultivation goes at least some way to explaining how compacted it is. Then came the back-breaking forking and digging, the hoeing to try and break up some of the huge clumps, the compost and more digging, and finally the raking. Seven hours of back-breaking work later I had – well, what was effectively a small ploughed field in front of my house. And – more excitingly – a place where the first new plant in our garden could put down roots…

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