Base Map from 1920

This is the original parchment map of the plot of the house, taken from the Conveyancing document of 1920. In it the land & cottage is sold to a Mrs Preston, by the combined owners/ freeholders from the original Withdean and Tongdean Estate, about 6 of them. It shows that the plot is 148 feet on its longest side, 124.5 feet on the opposite side, 63.5 feet on the back end of the party fencing, and a mere 46 ft at the top end. This measurement is repeated in each conveyancing deed until about 1952, by which time the cottage had been renumbered twice and the road had been renamed.
There is now a garage not in this plan, and also the extension with the conservatory, which was built in 1999. It is most 'quirky' as the Estate Agent insisted! Some friends have said only someone like us would take it on, seeing its potential under all the bindweed! It seems it was an 'Allotment Cottage', in 1912. A neighbour says the road was an Orchard.

1912 Allotment Cottages are the half-timbered buildings

1925

From 1920 onwards the house seems to have a dual history of 'quick buck' sales and long occupation. Some owners have not lived in it, such as Mr Ogden, a Baker & Confectioner from Kemptown, so was it rented out? Others, such as the Betts, lived in it for 40 years. The Library archives should give us a good idea, especially as the Conveyancing history shows when it was no. 5, then no.12. There is a Covenant which says we cannot run it as a Pleasure or Tea Garden open to the Public !

1955

A week already

and what have we done apart from... emptied 30+ boxes, set up the office, got a new dishwasher, sorted the shower out, planted and watered and weeded and weeded, and Michael has even found the secret path! The shed is big enough to convert into a garden room, especially if there's a veranda extension.
Some Stanmer Park Road people, and others came over on Bank Holiday Monday, and the rain held off. Chocolate Cake, Cava and the Comfort of Friends. Some people did their own Garden Tour, aided by Rafi until he returned to his playstationgame (who could blame him?).
We can get 20 people into the conservatory BUT NO PHOTOS OF THEM IN IT!

It rained today!

- the initial 2mm of earth was damp, the rest as dry as a dustbowl! It also rained at the Chelsea Show, so a grey day that we all really wanted, but a bit more rain would be good. I started a sunmapping exercise yesterday - maybe that's what caused it!
A lovely idea in a show garden - a green roof with all lavender on it. The shed will be ideal - clear away undergrowth, get it renovated and converted, maybe with a skylight in it too. Must cut away some of the the sycamore branches though. ... Bryn says they have been pollarded and then growth has been from lower laterals.

Our first left hand bed on tier three now has Matucana Sweet Peas planted on its edge, under the netting 'ridge tent', after a colossal bindweed-removing operation. All knotted into the netting, of course, along with the dried stems of last year's. Various other weeds and masses of FMNs made the bed look really lusciously green, but all a big con! There's a lovely lemon balm in there though, and I'll plant Climbing French Beans on the other side of the netting, with a line of Radish inside I think. Although when it all grows up, maybe I wouldn't be able to harvest it, so will have to think of something else!
Note for next year is to cull some of the FMN early in the year...

The second bed has Autumn-fruiting Raspberries, also deeply festooned with bindweed. The strength of that plant - it has brought quite high stems (not cut back this year) down in arches, and then 'tied' them at the bottom. It's a painstaking job, cutting out the BW stem by stem, but it has to be done. Quite meditative especially as the blackbirds were singing away (about 6pm) and the sun making the edges of the leaves glow from the other side. A job for a few minutes each day, I think.
I must draw a plan of this, as a base map, and then think about where to put other veg. 
On the other side of the path, abundant soft fruit!!! Summer raspberries just coming into a succession of ripening (had some for pudding - delicious!) and the berries turn out to be a mix of blackcurrants, red currants and maybe some white. All bowing over the path, so I used a long & stout Yellow Bamboo stem (cut from the bed outside the kitchen window) to tie them back, and then tied in some of the fruiting spurs. Nettles joining the bindweed here, so a long-trousered & shoes job, I think, not one for tonight. There will be lots - talk to Helen again about a shared freezer.

Lammas pretending I'm not there

Plume finds another way in!

Lammas has been away all night & day, and just at bedtime she was there sitting on the top step... small glowy eyes and a slight smudge of white in the dark distance. 'No thanks I won't come in...' I put some food outside. I wonder if she was frightened away by a pale ginger cat who obviously has been ousted from the territory. Odd that Plume doesn't seem to mind - maybe she thinks it's a ghostly Lugh!

Yesterday I bought/rescued a Bougainvillea for the conservatory

First plantings

Ginger Lily

Two Green Bush courgettes! The Top Garden is a triangle with a mix of annual and perennial planting such as Ginger Lily, poking their spears through the dry earth, iris, things I don't recognise, and lovely bloodred wallflowers, just past their best. So today I took out as much forget-me-not as possible and cut off the seedheads of the wallflowers down to a new shoot, to get a second flowering. Herb Robert everywhere, so the smell when weeding was sharp; the sticky seedcases of the FMN stuck to my gloves - ah, that's one way of passing on the genes!

Courgettes

 Dry earth (no rain for what, 6 weeks?) so I dug a hole, watered well, popped the courgettes in (two small flowerbuds already) and built a little earthwall around each one, for holding the water. A spot of chicken manure in the little moat (wow, another sharp smell, it's been sitting in that tub for quite a while!) and then water in a circle around it. Having found a few more pointy things poking through, I've put a bit of stone next to each, to mark their location. And then edged the bed with more wallflowers - this time Violet Prince that I have grown from seed. They might flower this year, later, but I am hoping to get two years out of them.
Coming back down the stepped path, what a marvellous picture of the double-flowered pink roses - Paul's Himalayan Musk - climbing all over the Pergola, along with honeysuckle, jasmine, grapevine, clematis... how does the structure stay up?
And a bit later, soaking the working aches out in a hot bath, another new view - yew, clematis seedheads, another single pink rose, and something else that I don't recognise!

Moving in and moving out

 So many plants are waiting here for their own moving day that the previous owners are popping back to collect them in huge batches... such as the Epiphidiums hanging in the cool shade of the Pergola, having a little rest from the Conservatory's heat. Meanwhile my extra plants are on holiday at Lizi's awaiting their relocation. Sitting on my Patio are hardy geranium phaeum, acer trees in pots, trays of seedlings ready to find permanent homes... o, what bliss :-)

the garden

As we left, I took photos of the rooms at the old house... I haven't seen it looking like this ever really... when I moved in, there were two sorts of carpet in the ground floor receps, the kitchen was a tiny hole with a small workshop behind it, and the garden was a straight lawn & path & flowerbed edges. How small it now seems, maybe because it is empty.

dining end of the kitchen 

lovely light windows in lounge 

the deck...

New Boundaries

What a garden we have bought! There are so many angles from which to look at it, it looks like a different place from each one. Which way round do you walk - up the secret path to the shed and then break through the undergrowth by the Tree Peony? Straight up the steps to the top and turn and "wow"? When people come to do The Tour, where should we begin? At what point do we stop to pick up the cup of tea?

Palm to the sky

My palm is open to the sky, light coming through fronds and fingers, exotics and commoners all together, waiting for another's loving touch