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Jack Hill moved with his wife and family to a house called Brookside at St Mary's, Chalford, Gloucestershire in 1962, and renovated it over a number of years. Here he talks about his work in the gardens.
The coltsfoot, mare's tail and convolvulus were so rampant that I had to resort to copious quantities of weedkiller.
An element of the original Planning Approval was the inclusion of a timber pergola with paving outside the dining room. {One day I had planned to alter that window to a French style set of doors.}
The posts had been fabricated at an early stage but they had lain around the garden getting in the way or been used as props or a staging for digging silt from the river.
Therefore I resolved that there was no time like now to get it completed so I bought second hand softwood joists from Gloucester which were brought out on a low loader together with two steel joists for a bridge.
The paving had been salvaged during alterations at the Fire Station in Cheltenham and was 600mm square concrete, 50 mm thick, which I laid with 75mm gaps filled with shingle. The first backbreaking job was to remove cement from the undersides.
The posts were galvanised steel with base plates, and so could be sat on a bed of sand at the bottom of the post holes. Stability was achieved by high-level connections to the house.
One short post was supported on a plinth of Cotswold stone salvaged from the wall of the mill stream alongside. The work on the wall allowed steps to be laid down to the water, making it easier to get down to pick blackberries down by the river.
In a short space of time I had planted honeysuckle, clematis and climbing roses and these were heading skywards. At the same time I planted a new black grape vine in a bed against the wall of the dining room, and in the year 2001 it is now quite rampant.
Sadly, in my opinion all the work on the pergola has been removed and expensive York stone slabs laid where the paviors were.
In between times, I rolled the steel girders down the garden and launched them via stepladders over to the far bank and laid a decking of 50mm boards bought in Sharpness from a firm who had transported a train or two of wagons previously used at the China clay quarries in Cornwall.
Whilst working in Gloucester with Frank Timothy's office, I met a chap who arranged for me to buy at cost a macerator pump system so I was able to dig a hole for the sump, divert pipes, and lay a 50mm pressure main through the garden shed to a GRP septic tank. Thus came the end of the pollution problem,
Next, all the rain water gutters had to be re-fixed to fall either to downpipes and soakaways or over the lean-to shed to the river.
A different type of job involved the yew trees opposite Clayfield Mill. These I lopped back to the level they were at some 40 years previously. I omitted to seek official approval for this vital work and was admonished by the Tree Officer and told I had just narrowly avoided being fined £1,000. Oops!
Continued ......
Jack Hill, St Alban's, Hertfordshire, 2002
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