Everything, Everywhere all at once

That’s how it feels at Bossiney Court right now.

After a winter where it felt like nothing was happening, and when we had some anxious and stressful moments trying to decide how much to compromise on our planning application, finally in January we received the notification that our plan had been approved and we could begin building work. Cue much relief and celebration!

Then, towards the end of February, work on our roof (which was subject to a separate, earlier planning application) finally began – almost six months late. I think we would have been much more irritated and impatient about the delay if we hadn’t also been waiting for the main planning application to be approved. When you are waiting anxiously for one big thing, waiting for another doesn’t seem like such a big stretch. Within days, work on the roof and on the main house had suddenly begun, and the normally quiet house was alive with the sound of laughter, music, hammering and banging.

At the same time, the dormant garden began to wake up from its winter slumber, and a magnificent carpet of snowdrops and then daffodils began to reveal themselves. Whoever planted these bulbs (I suspect Miss Everard, who used to own the house and pottery) must have been a galanthophile, because there are several different varieties of snowdrops, some very lovely.

I have been deliberately holding back from doing much in the garden (and from buying plants) because I’ve been very busy winding up my work in London and preparing to take a sabbatical over the summer. At the end of March I shall be officially unemployed and ready to throw myself into establishing the vegetable garden and helping Fiddian with the house. Fiddian has kindly finished building the greenhouse/glass cathedral for me to start work in, and I am greatly looking forward to spending most of the summer in there partaking of “gardening leave”.

One garden task that I did get involved in was the clearing of the walled garden. Over winter, all of the tree work had created huge piles of eucalyptus and leylandii branches and brush, making it hard to even see the garden, never mind plan a future for it. As I’ve written elsewhere, the walled garden, whose walls have a separate Grade II listing from the house, is inaccessible to machinery due to its very narrow entranceways. This makes it impossible to move large items or large quantities of garden matter without a great deal of effort. So, during the course of one wintry but calm Sunday, Fiddian and I burned 95% of it in a huge bonfire, which was immensely cathartic (in fact, I think it was during that day that I decided it was time to resign from my job).

My main garden goal for this year is to get the vegetable garden established, and to begin for it to be productive. I recorded my long-term goals for the veg garden here. For the walled garden, I have even more modest goals: keep it reasonably clear, watch where the sunlight falls and make a plan for where the paths and beds should go. I anticipate that establishing the veg garden is going to involve a huge amount of work, so trying to do too much with the walled garden is just going to exhaust me. Coupled with that, the front of the house will be alive with builders, roofers and scaffolding for many more months, so trying to landscape a garden there right now is probably wasted effort.

Finally, I have been somewhat remiss in documenting what has been going on with the interior works of the house, and I will try to rectify that in some subsequent posts. Since early March we have been working with a couple of excellent local builders who have begun to very gently strip away the damp and inadequate interior work done inside Number 2 in the early 80s, stripping the rooms back to the original walls and earthen floors.

Our plan is to rework these interior spaces in much more sustainable, sympathetic materials such as lime plaster, which will allow the walls to breathe rather than fill with damp. As you can see from the photos, there is a very long way to go, but after such a long, slow start, the progress we have seen in the past few weeks feels immensely satisfying.