Danielle's magic way with gardens

One of the features that first attracted us to the house we live in now, near the Spanish city of Valencia, was its back garden. And when I say ‘us’, I mean all of us, including the toy poodles Luci and Toffee and the cat Misty, alas no longer with us.

A feature that made it particularly appealing was that it was a sun trap for most of the day. The house faces East-West so the back garden gets the morning sun, and then the front catches it from late morning on so that, even in January, we were able to have lunch out of doors there several times in recent weeks.

Even in the afternoon, the back garden is long enough to catch the sun pretty much until it sets. Or at least, it would have been, had sunlight not been cut off by one of the garden’s apparent charms: the tall cypress hedges down each side. With the grass in between them, those hedges provided privacy and an enclosed spot of greenery for us all to enjoy, but with a serious downside.

Toffee enjoying the old garden

Misty found the garden a fine place for his retirement

Indeed, when looked at more closely, things weren’t quite as good as they seemed. Not by any means. The hedges, thirty years old, had grown so high as to cut off the sun. Deprived of it, many other plants simply couldn’t thrive. Besides, over those three decades, the hedges had invaded the garden and, like Russian tanks in Ukrainian territory, were in defiant and arrogant occupation of far too much of that relatively small space, making it smaller still.

Attractive. But enclosed. And deprived of light
That’s Luci and Toffee in the background

Rainscape dominated by cypress hedges
Note the brown patches

What’s more, after all that time, patches of dead vegetation were beginning to appear amongst the cypresses, breaking the pleasing green with ugly areas of dull brown. And as for the grass, lawns aren’t really made for Mediterranean climates, and ours could only be maintained by constant watering. These days, watering grass feels like something of an ecological sin.

From the day we arrived, we talked about taking the cypresses down. That would flood the garden with light. It would widen it. It would allow other plants and flowers to grow and bloom.

Our neighbours urged us to go ahead. They were sick of the hedges. One even offered to contribute to the costs on her side, where the fence, into and through which the hedge had grown, had suffered most damage and would need most work.

We got some quotes for taking the hedges down. They seemed excessive to us. “Why didn’t we do the job ourselves?”, we wondered. I mean, how much effort could it really represent?

I can answer that second question now. It was a colossal task. And backbreaking. 

What was worst was where the hedge had grown through the fencing. 

Pruned trunks ready for the chainsaw

You see, the deal was that we’d cut all the branches off the cypresses. The gardeners who come around weekly would then take the trunks down with their chain saws. Our local council has a wonderful arrangement whereby, if we tie pruned branches together in bundles that aren’t too big (that wasn’t a problem, because I certainly had no intention of carrying bundles big enough to be unpleasantly heavy), we can dump them at the kerbside and they’ll collect them. 

But they wouldn’t do that if there were bits of metal, such as parts of our garden fence, still firmly joined to the branches. So we had to separate them. The presence of our son Michael proved a tremendous boon, as he was apparently inexhaustible in disentangling branches from fencing.

As for the metal waste that emerged, nothing could be simpler. Danielle explained to me that I just had to leave it, too, on the kerbside, since there’s a constant flow of cars on our streets, carrying people who make their living collecting the metal waste people throw out, and turning it into something they can sell. And, indeed, when I dumped a pile of fencing waste on the pavement outside our house, it was gone less than twenty minutes later. 

Waste metal.
Left on the kerbside, it was gone in 20 minutes

Unfortunately, the side where fence and hedge had become so welded together was so damaged by removing the hedge that we had to get it replaced. Though before we could do that, we also had to repair the little wall on which the fence stood.

The wall that supports the fence repaired

New fence in place

Still, that was all done in time. We put up willow fencing inside the metal to make it all more aesthetic. And Danielle turned the garden into a low-water environment, replacing almost all the grass by gravel, with patches of earth in which plants can grow, alongside the much wider flowerbeds we can enjoy now that the hedges have been removed, adding perhaps as much as a third to the width of the garden. 

New Look

Toffee approves

It's winter still, so the new plants are still a way from blooming. But we’re heading fast towards spring, and the new garden will soon be a blaze of colour. A very different place from the one that greeted us when we moved here, but in its specific way, far more attractive.

Getting ready for spring

That’s the Danielle magic touch in gardening.

New Look from the other angle
With the artist at work in the background