So Long To A Labour Of Love

A man with a van duly arrived on Sunday morning and took the outdoor potted pants down to the new house in Framlingham. The van was packed full when we'd finished loading it and it marked the decline of the garden that has been Marion's pride and joy over the last twenty-three years.

Here's how it looked shortly after we moved in; a patch of lawn and some pretty ugly concrete flagstones was the sum total of our green space. We started to dig a pond but in general, it was somewhere for the kids to play.

As the children grew up and the climbing frame and goal posts fell into disuse, we concentrated on making the garden an oasis in our little piece of suburbia.

The old flagstones were replaced with a curved stone patio and the borders were planted with shrubs, trees, perennials and annuals and it started to look like a gardener's garden. Marion studied plants and read avidly about the subject.

And finally, last year, we felt that we'd got it just right - just in time to put the house on the market. Oh well, it has given us both a lot of pleasure in the last twenty years. Let's hope that when we start again in Framlingham late this year we can equal of better what we did here - being retired we'll have more time and, having a bit more cash than we had when the kids were young, we might be able to buy bigger specimen plants to give us a bit of a head start.

We took time off on Saturday to visit a window showroom. We're looking for windows for the new house and we discovered that the nearest showroom of a company whose windows appealed was in Leeds. After we'd checked out the showroom (the windows were extremely nice), I suggested to Marion that we got ourselves a bit to eat before heading back home. I saw the sign to Harewood House and guessed that there would be a cafe there, so off we went. We had a very pleasant lunch in the terrace cafe overlooking these lovely formal gardens but, as it was £20 to get into the grounds, it ended up costing us £50 for  sandwiches and cake with a pot of tea. Which wouldn't have been bad if we hadn't simply gone to the cafe and set off home.

Speaking of stately homes, we came across this old photo when we were sorting through the coffer full of photographs the other day. One of our five minutes of fame (almost an hour actually).