Michael's Garden

When Andy asked me to join him on a garden search in the middle of June I wasn’t exactly enthusiastic.

However, as he explained that the house was halfway along the high street of a delightful Cotswolds village that grew up around the Tudor wool trade, the idea became a bit more interesting. By the time he’d mentioned the garden was large and that parts of the house dated to the 16th century, well, then I was truly sold.

We arrived at the house and found just over four acres of lawn on offer (Fig.1) but we were a little nervous about digging out sods of grass in high summer because they would inevitably die back. The homeowner, Michael, came to meet us and said he was happy for us to ‘go for it’ and understood the probable outcome. So, we set off wondering what, if anything might be lurking in the soil.

As with any garden that has seen a few hundred years of activity the first thing we were aware of was a large amount of hot rocks. These originated from where the coal fire ash had been emptied onto the soil, along with aluminium plant tags from once formal gardens and a surprising number of musket balls (Fig.2). Not knowing much about the history of the house or garden, we initially just pottered here and there but all the time we were finding worn Georgian halfpennies and tombac buttons.

Eventually I managed a couple of more interesting finds. First up was a narrow strip of lead with lettering engraved into it. Once washed up this turned out to another plant label reading ‘G LAWRENCEI X FARRIERI’ (Fig.3). Some Internet research soon revealed that this is a small but hardy rockery plant made popular in the early 1900s.