Today
The survey reports on Spencer House have come back and they show that the property is in a conservation area and that there are at least two trees, a beech and a red cypress, with preservation orders in the garden. Well I wasn't planning to hack them down anyway; just a little pruning, maybe?
The bit I do want to hack down is a thick hedge of Cupressocyparis Leylandii, that obstructs where I want to build the conservatory.
"I'll probably win an award if I cut that down," I joked to Lizzie.
In My Day
How exciting it was, back in 1975, to move into our first proper own house. The fact that it was so newly built that everything reeked of damp plaster and the garden was a sea (a very small sea, admittedly) of mud, didn't matter at all.
I had no idea about gardening and neither did Paul. (In, fact he still proudly knows nothing about gardening.) But the space was small and easy to manage, surely? And the faster things grew and the more "instant" they were, so much the better.
In one way, I was better off than Beverley and John, who'd bought the house on the end. In addition to the pocket handkerchief at the back and grass verge at front, they had a strip that bordered the corner.
Privacy and safety being top priorities, John went out to find what plant he could use to achieve this end and so discovered the Leylandii. He planted about ten, close together. "They grow to about forty feet," he said happily. Never mind that they would obscure the sunlight, put roots out dangerously close to the house's foundations and require acrobatic skills to carry out the pruning, here was privacy that grew almost in an instant.
We only lived at Rowan Avenue (what happened to the rowans? they probably all died under the influence of the Leylandii) for seven years and the hedge was already a rather formidable object, threatening to engulf the pavement totally and consuming much of John's time in attempts to keep it cut back and tidy.
The trouble was, John wasn't the only person to think that these quick-growing conifers were the gardener's dream, All over Britain, Leylandii became ubiquitous, even appearing as hedges in the rural landscape and imparting an incongruous air to our otherwise pleasantly mixed greenery.
Having had our flirtation with instant hedging, we are now busily grubbing up these monstrous plantations as unmanageable eyesores.
I wonder what John's view of Leylandii hedges is now and whether the one he planted at Rowan avenue still survives.
1 comment:
That John was a very sensible chap. His Leylandii were planted facing east and had little effect on light in his garden. And because they're surface-rooting, Leylandii don't threaten foundations.
It's fashionable to be sniffy about them but as a quick and cheap screen on a new and featureless estate, they remain a good option when you've just committed almost every penny to a first mortgage!
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