The bank above the track to the barn remained raw and unfinished whilst we were planting up the sand garden three years ago. Facing steeply down, steeper than any other slopes we are gardening here, there was work to do before they could be planted. A new dry-stone wall to the rear gave definition to the precipitous bank that stepped up again to the grown out hedge above it. This singular gesture added far more to this place than I had at first imagined. Something beautifully crafted and weighty to hunker the bank into the slope. A cast concrete wall to the front was our last move to retain the slope and to ready the bank for planting. The cast wall skirts the old track to hold the bank back and was drawn in a descending arc to ride the slope and provide seating. A place to take in the panorama and to eventually feel nestled and cushioned by the planting that would hold the steepness behind it. 

In the first years, way before I’d even dreamed of extending the garden here, I planted a pear orchard to take advantage of the south-facing slopes and the shelter provided by the barns and the hedge above. Only two of the original trees remain now, the neatly growing ‘Concorde’ and the larger but lusciously melting ‘Merton Pride’. We soon found that the wall-trained pears in the kitchen garden were easier to pick and ripened more reliably against the heat of the wall and that when pears ripen, they do so all at once and you need to be ready for the week they come on stream.