Happy birthday, Bluebell.

Sixteen years ago this week, in February 2007, I walked through the gate at Bluebell Cottage Gardens for the first time as the new owner. Armed with little more than energy, drive and the equivalent of a GCSE in Horticulture, I planned to make a life and perhaps even a living out of growing plants at this seemingly derelict site.

As the saying goes, if I’d known then what I know now, I should have run a mile at first sight of the place. I can’t even blame the folly and naivety of youth - I was 45 and had successfully run two IT businesses. Inevitably, making a success of Bluebell proved to be harder work than I could possibly have imagined.

I had just one card up my sleeve as I walked in - the previous year I had won the BBC Gardener of the Year competition. It had been broadcast a few weeks before and I figured the publicity might just see me through the first year. But on that first day, where to start…

Hard deadlines hit us from the beginning. We picked up the keys on the 22nd February, 2007. The RHS handbook listed the nursery as re-opening on 17th March. And on the 28th April the gardens were due to open for charity under the National Gardens Scheme. Both were plainly impossible tasks, but oh, how I love a deadline…

With the help of family, friends and the small existing nursery team, we cleared the nursery just in time, shunting all the un-weeded plants to a hidden spot behind the polytunnels. Tony and Ged fixed the tea room roof. We punched a new entrance through the hedge directly from the car park. And two days before we opened, Peter the gardener and I turned the sales shed round to face the new entrance gate. When the astonished staff came in the next day and asked how we’d done it, Peter hitched up his heavy trousers, directed a thick, cracked thumb at me and said, ‘Ah lifted it and she pushed it round like ‘orse.’

With the nursery open, albeit with almost no customers (we took £232.40 in the whole of that first March) we started on the garden. Again, help was on hand from the team here and some new friends from my RHS Diploma course at Reaseheath College. Still, the task seemed insurmountable. I worked furiously, seven days a week in every daylight hour, losing around a stone and steadily finding a working strength and stamina that my office-softened body didn’t know it had.

I’m often asked whether face-to-face horticulture courses are worth the time and expense. The answer is yes, yes and yes again. You’ll learn more about plants than you will ever need to know and forget most of it. What sticks are the deep friendships you make and the accidental conversations over lunch that lead to, well you never know where at the time. But lead somewhere they inevitably will.

I digress. We had a derelict one and a half acre garden to open for charity in five weeks time. I tried to cancel, but the regional NGS organiser gently reminded me that the Yellow Book is stocked in every WH Smiths and library around the country. The great and the good of Cheshire would turn up whether the gates were open or not. His only words of advice were to not run out of cake….

We struck lucky. A few warm, fine days beforehand dried up the lawns and lured the Pulsatillas in the tiny gravel garden into revealing their jewel-like colours. And the bluebell woods next to the meadow exceeded anything I could have imagined, proving to be the one part of the estate agent’s sales blurb that was not an exaggeration. The day went perfectly and I collapsed as we shut the gates, relieved at passing this first, momentous milestone.

Although we’d smartened the garden up for opening, it was obvious that many areas were in desperate need of improvement. There were huge expanses of lawn and thin, mean borders with overgrown or ill-pruned plants elbowing out weaker neighbours. The perpetual task of developing the gardens began that autumn, starting with this dull half acre of lawn. The two pictures below are taken from almost exactly the same spot, 7 years apart.

All of that was sixteen years ago. Since then the gardens, nursery, the house and life have all changed beyond recognition. But this post is long enough already. So, by way of a potted summary of events since then:

• We built four back to back gardens from 2007 to 2010 and one Gold medal winning show garden at RHS Tatton Show in 2011

• We’ve created around twenty RHS Floral Marquee exhibits at Malvern, Chelsea, Chatsworth and Tatton, winning five gold medals. This one is from Tatton Show, 2022.

  

• Every part of the garden has now been re-developed, including in 2022 the creation of a new walled garden and our moongate, much beloved by our visitors, especially for selfies :-)

  

• The nursery has a new potting shed, an insulated Keder House for propagation and much larger outside growing on areas. Our online mail order service was launched in 2012 and a trade supply list launched in 2016.

• In 2018 I was asked to become one of three Garden Advisors for the new RHS Bridgewater Garden at Salford. It’s a huge privilege to be involved in this internationally acclaimed project and I am very proud to be a part of it. My roles with the RHS continue to expand - in 2023 I’m leading the Helenium Trial at RHS Bridgewater, and there may be more - watch this space :-)

There have been wobbles, of course. The pandemic meant closing the gardens and nursery at peak season in 2020 and again in 2021. With a season’s worth of stock ready to sell we were lucky that our mail order service was ready to fly, and fly it did as the UK took to its gardens in that long, warm spring. Within a month we went from packing 20 boxes a week to 250. It was an astonishing feat which everyone here should be hugely proud of.

There have been painful losses too. Devastatingly, in 2022 we lost a dear, dear friend Martin Olver to a sudden heart attack. In 2020 a huge beech tree came down in a storm, separating a pair that we think were 150 years old.

Talking of separations, in 2019 my husband of 22 years left very suddenly. Love is blind, they say, and I didn’t see it coming, but then, neither did anyone else. Over a glass of wine one January night I learned that he no longer loved our life here, or me for that matter. And with that he was gone to live a new life elsewhere.

It took a year or so for the psychological shockwaves to subside and for adrenalin to stop pouring through my veins at the slightest recollection. But I have never sought to stop anyone from being or doing whatever they need to do and never will. My wonderful team here rallied round, finished my sentences when I lost my thread, deciphered my incoherent intentions and ran the place like a dream. Thank you all :-)

Once I recovered the ability to think straight, I learned to fly solo, metaphorically and literally, gaining my microlight pilots licence in 2021. Some of you have been brave enough to fly with me :-). Life now is better in every conceivable way, through the love of family and friends, and of course my now not-so-new partner Steve who brings more love and laughter to my life than I could have thought possible. Lucky me. xx