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Apart from historic photographs, unless otherwise stated, all photos on this site were taken by members of my family. Please don't republish them without my permission. Thanks. © 2008 Mark Collins 10-06-2010 | This is our greatest shared passion!Here is some information about our garden in Sussex. In June 2003 I added a 'Garden Calendar Album' to this site, showing some of the plants and activities in our Sussex garden through the year.
This is a picture of our garden on 1st July 2001 with the astilbes under the pergola flowering their socks off. Our garden in Summer - the Agapathus, or African Lillies, are lovely plants and seem to do well. We grow them in pots, as they are not 100% frost hardy. In June 2002 we visited a specialist nursery in Devon and added several new ones to our collection. The picture below was taken in August 2001, when the garden was at full power! If you look closely you will see Alan looking over the shrubs in the middle background! As you can see we are fortunate in that our plants have It took us two years to create and fill the borders - we are hoping that we can have a more relaxing in the years to come - but I expect we'll find more projects to do.
Behind Alan in the large picture is our vegetable garden, a new venture for us. We usually have a good crop of runner beans, sand summer salads, although due to the shade from surrounding trees the garden is not ideal for vegetables. However, even though the yield is low, there is nothing quite like vegetables fresh from your own garden!
We are always keen to meet and correspond with other gardeners (and swap plants) - so drop us a line. You will find more pictures of our garden in the Photo Album and our 'Garden Calendar Album'.
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a lovely backdrop of established trees and shrubs. We are not overlooked at all. The False Acacia overhanging the lawn is beautiful but a real pain - it drops leaves and 'bits' all over the lawn all summer. Had it not been so attractive it would have bitten the dust by now!
In 2001 we demolished a rather ancient shed to make space for a new greenhouse and gravel garden, we finally erected the greenhouse in 2003, the gravel garden still planned!
Living in the country means we suffer a deluge of leaves in the autumn which we rake up and turn into leaf mould. We are both committed to using the minimum amount of chemicals in the garden - about our only concessions are slug pellets to keep these voracious beasts at bay.