So we're in day 13 of the build, by now we should ideally have all the hard landscaping
finished but unfortunately it's been something of a challenging build, challenging design,
difficult one to build this and so we're basically a couple of days behind. Ideally
I'd like to be getting all the planting done in all the different areas starting now because
you really need to see the whole thing at once without machines in your view you need to stand
back and see the whole thing and it fits together like a really intricate puzzle but as it is at
the moment with machines going on stone going in all over the place it's really difficult and
we've only got a very few areas like bits at the back here to get going with on the planting but
hopefully tomorrow we've got the whole of the front freed up and I can really get stuck into it
but it's a little bit frustrating at the moment. You can see from all this stone which I chose
because it has a kind of dry quality about it that this is a fairly arid garden so we're sort of
doing dry Mediterranean climate planting not Mediterranean geographical region but Mediterranean
climates plants more of those regions around the world so they might have a wetish winter but
then they used to being dried out in the summer and of course this is spring so things are going
to be in flower and a little bit lush but what would really happen in this landscape is that the
water which is going to be in this area that will dry out the water levels would drop through
late spring and summer to probably nothing and then the plants will have to put up with that kind
of drought and that's when you go on holiday in the Mediterranean you see a sort of dusty greeny
gray landscape with very little flower but at the moment there's going to be flower and so
that's what we're working towards. All the stone here is a limestone it's actually from different
places but all the rocks here and the stones in the stream are from Dorset it's it's Purbeck stone
and it's from the late Jurassic period and so too is the stone that we're using for the bridges
here and the islands it's from Portugal but it's from the same sort of period and it sort of fits
together in that way and what it means is it's all very fossil rich you can't see it in the in the
Purbeck stone apart from the Ammonite that we've got over there but in this sawn Portuguese stone
you can see all the fossils in the surface here which makes it really interesting gives it really
good character. I think it's important with this garden that I'm not trying to recreate anywhere
in particular so I'm not trying to recreate Provence or something like that what I'm trying to
it's a sort of imagined landscape and I suppose what I've done in a way of cherry picked things
that I've seen from my travels around the world and these different places and I've brought them
all together into this sort of place that exists only in my mind until now and here it is.
