I am not much of a gardener, it's Vera who calls all the shots in our garden, I just do as I'm told. Actually, now I come to think of it, that's the story of my life for the past 45 years (LOL). When we lived in Hemingford Grey (we moved from there in 2003) we had a fairly large back garden which was mainly flower borders, a lawn and a large pond. I am not enamoured with grass and lawns, they seem to me to be the source of a hell of a lot of work with very little benefit. Over a few years I managed by stealth to reduce the size of our back-garden lawn, and to do away with the front-garden lawn completely.
The pond was my thing though and we started-out with a small one which I gradualy enlarged over many years until I had a small lake! We graduated from a small wild-life pond to start with, increased it a few years later and went for a mix of fish, goldfish, golden orfe, green tench, grass carp, bitterling amongst others. But in Hemingford we had a problem with herons and our pond was cleared-out a few times. We tried all the usual so-called remedies against herons, none of which was at all successful until we discovered heron-wires.
You perhaps will not read about this method anywhere else as at first-sight it appears to be hazardous to the herons and other birds, however, I assure you it is not hazardous if it is properly done. This only works for ponds in small to moderately sized gardens, preferably of fairly regular shape. The basic idea is that you stretch a series of taut strings or 'wires' across your garden at approximately 2 foot (600 mm) spacings and at about 7 to 8 feet high (2100 to 2400 mm). The wires are actually best low tensile fishing line and have to cover the whole garden area. It is important not to use actual wire or even string as these would be a danger to the birds, at least to larger birds (small birds will fly in and out of the gaps between and it will not affect them one little bit. Larger birds (including herons, ducks, geese etc) can see the wires and almost always will not attempt to land. Occasionally, very occasionally a larger bird will try to land and this is why the 'wires' have to be made from a low breaking strain material to avoid injuries. It is important, of course, to repair any breakages promptly. The fishing line is very thin and almost impossible for us humans to see, you certainly won't notice it at this height above your garden.
When we left Hemingford the pond was the main thing that I missed apart from the many friends we had made in the village over the years, I still miss them. The neighbours are another thing entirely; we had spent a lot of there time over many years supporting and helping our (mostly elderly) neighbours and, at the end, when they found out that we were 'abandoning' them, they almost all turned against us and became very hostile. Yes, we had few real friends amongst our neighbours it seems, a few true friends but not all that many.
And Hemingford Grey had become, over a period of thirty years, a shadow of its former self. When we arrived in 1974 there were several good shops, a tea-room, village pub, post office, small supermarket, general stores, butcher, a sensible church community and several visiting vans such as library, fishmonger; altogether it was a very good village to live in. Over the thirty years that we lived there almost all of these amenities disappeared, as they have in many, many English villages over this time. It's a sad fact of life but England is not the place it was. Maybe we can be accused of living in the past and not moving with the times and I would not necessarily disagree with that, but the past was a better place, of that I am completely sure. So we thought to move and we began to look for a new home, somewhere with the village atmosphere but with the day-to-day amenities that we wanted.
So we looked for such a village in Cambridgeshire, thinking that we should not move very far from friends we had gathered over the years. It seemed the right thing to do, find a village with all the day-to-day things that we wanted, but not so far away that we would lose touch with everyone we knew. We had been thirty years in Hemingford, that is a large chunk of lifetime and we did quite a bit of soul-searching before coming to a decision. In the event we found Cambourne, or rather The Cambournes, three new villages being built between Cambridge and Saint Neots. It was a 'greenfield' project, three new villages being created on old farmland. We visited a few times in the early stages and we became convinced that this was going to be something special. Great Cambourne, Upper Cambourne and Lower Cambourne were going to be build over a period of a few years; three villages created out of nothing and with the amenities that a population of a few thousand would need for self-contained day-to day living. It seemed an exciting prospect and one that we decided to sign-up to. Our decision was influenced by our discovery that almost every 'old' Cambridgeshire village had, by then, lost most of their shops and were, very much like Hemingford, dormitory villages.
We found a house that we thought would fit our lifestyle, and at this time, we were also thinking that we might buy a house in Spain to spend our winters in. Spain, I talk about elsewhere so I will not digress here except to say that our choice of house in Cambourne was strongly influenced by our desire to spend our winters in a warmer place. Anyway we found a three storey so-called Town House in the centre of Great Cambourne, only minutes from the shops and all of the other facilities that Great Cambourne was going to contain. We moved-in in April 2003 when relatively few of those facilities were actually ready but there was a Morrison supermarket already up and running which we saw as a good start. We were able to complete the purchase of the new house a month before completing the sale of our house in Hemingford and we used that month to 'sort-out' the Cambourne garden which was a small walled courtyard style comprising only builders 'top-clay' with one tree, a birch sapling which promptly fell over as soon as they planted it. If only we had taken this as the omen that God intended it to be ........
Anyway, this page is supposed to be about gardens, I must not digress.
To be continued .......
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