About
The gardener is Mike Warren, Vicar of St Peter’s Church, Tunbridge Wells.
I’ve always loved gardening – I was the only one who really helped Mum in the garden – yes, Dad cut the grass, but my 4 brothers weren’t interested at all. Now I do most of the creative work at The Vicarage, my wife helps with the weeding (hooray!) and grass cutting, but my daughters are not interested at all.
Being a vicar has both advantages and disadvantages when it comes to gardening. The advantages are that, working from home, I can pop out and keep an eye on plants and seedlings, and open or closing the greenhouse as necessary etc. The disadvantages are that working long hours and 6 days a week (not just Sundays, as people say!) means that it’s hard to find time for longer jobs, and there’s never enough money to buy what I’d like to – everything’s done on a shoestring. But then that can be very satisfying: making raised beds out of old church floorboards was particularly rewarding!
The biggest advantage is that we have a much larger garden that we would ever have been able to buy if I was still a physio. So what’s the garden like?
Well, it’s large (about 150 feet long by 100 wide( and south facing – a good start. However, there are a number of large trees which cast long shadows especially in winter. When we moved in, there were about 35 leylandii forming a 10′ wide hedge diagonally across part of the garden.
The house was built in the early 1980′s on the very large garden of a Victorian house which is now divided into flats. The soil is acid, but varies in quality – in some places beautiful loam, in others thick clay, and in others stony and thin. A local man who used to work in the old garden said that the good parts are where the vegetable garden used to be. What the bad bits were, I don’t know!
There are six pine trees (5 with preservation orders, 1 without), 5 silver birch (including jacquemontii & nigra), two oaks, a row of leylandii (aagh!!), flowering cherries, and other ornamental evergreens and deciduous trees that I still haven’t identified. We had to have a chestnut felled soon after we moevd in because not only was it far too large, it was also diseased. I’ve replaced it with two prunus serrula.
There are a number of mature rhododendrons, camelias and other shrubs, some of which are coming to the end of their lives and will need to be replaced soon.
