AYLSHAM MEETING HOUSE GARDEN

A summary by Anne Marsden, prepared for the Quaker Gardens Project.

Our garden is very small, it measures 14x7 feet. It is on the west front of the Meeting House and is shaded on three sides by walls. It only gets the east sun first thing in the morning in the winter for about one hour. In the summer it gets virtually no sun except when the sun is at its highest and again only for about one hour.

The Meeting House is in a small yard called Pegg's yard, which was named after Mr. Pegg an Aylsham builder. The yard has four houses in it and our M.H.. We put 'window' boxes on the lower roof to brighten up the area for the residents and visitors/hirers coming to the building. As you can see from the posts and shingle there are three parking spaces.

The garden looking west.

The window boxes

As you can see from the picture the garden is very stony and however many stones are gathered more appear!

These pictures were taken in the early spring, now it is a riot of colour with daffodils, iris, violets, forget-me-nots and other spring bulbs.

We have a small bucket/pond filled, with water iris and an oxygenating plant, which provides water for birds and a neighbour's cat!

The garden because of its position is very difficult to maintain. In the spring there is no problem as bulbs grow readily but most are renewed each year. In the summer it is a difficult garden to keep going because of it being so shaded and for much of the time so dry. Two plants which enjoy their situation are geranium endressii and a fern.

	Key: 1: Japanese Maple 2: Clematis 3: Hornbeam 4: Escalonia 5: Cotoneaster

On the back wall is a weedy clematis which is struggling to survive, there is builders rubble below the earth along the rear of the garden, but the ever green bushes cotoneaster and escallonia enjoy their position.

We have for the past four years had a theme to the garden, one year it was a pink/red garden; another had a seaside theme as we are near the coast, with blues and yellows.

Last summer we had a Peace Garden with mainly white plants, but the weather was so dry it was difficult to keep the plants going. In fact we find that the best way is to keep identical plants at home and replace the weary sun starved ones whenever necessary.

This year it will also be a Peace Garden to see if improvements can be made in the choice of plants. We have always tried to keep small delicate plants because of the small space but this year we are going to introduce more hardy and robust summer plants such as geraniums as they should survive better in the conditions.

The garden is of course very sheltered and amazingly an annual marguerite has survived for four years!! It grew to the height of about three feet and two feet in breadth, sadly it succumbed to the snow and frosts this year.

The larger of the two trees is a hornbeam which has to be pruned. At the other end of the garden is a small Japanese maple which also has to be pruned drastically every year as it would stop light entering the ground floor room of the M.H.

In spite of our garden being so tiny it brings pleasure to many people and one of the main comments we hear is how peaceful and natural it is.