Why I think I have Britain’s most beautiful garden

Collaboration with Just Landlords

Do you have Britain’s most beautiful garden? This post is my entry into the competition from Just Landlords to find the most beautiful garden in the Britain. The winner will receive a £250 Love2Shop voucher. Find out how to enter here.

We don’t live in a big house. It’s two rooms downstairs, one bathroom and two and a half bedrooms. It feels spacious because it has huge windows and I try not to fill it full of clutter, but it’s essentially NOT BIG.

There are only two of us of course, plus cats, so it’s not a massive deal, but sometimes, when Belle is into her fourth episode of *insert some random Netflix series here* in the living room, I want somewhere to BE that isn’t sat on my bed like a despondent teenager.

My garden is that place.

Luckily for me, Belle isn’t keen on ‘outside’ as a concept, and so the garden is the place that’s totally mine. Even in my bedroom I can’t be sure that she won’t be hiding under the bed to grab my ankles in some kind of hilarious (for her) prank, but the garden… I’m safe there. The garden is the place I can go to be by myself.

What’s extra special to me about my garden is that when I bought my house two years ago, it was essentially a gravelled prison yard. I mean literally nothing, just a square of fenced in misery, complete with spider nests, one random patio slab, and patches of pink where I had taken advantage of the space to spray paint my bed after a break up.

It was not a thing of beauty.

(The bed is though.)

It’s wasn’t exactly the kind of place you wanted to escape to. More escape from. Possibly by tunnelling, or bribing a guard for a length of rope.

One of the things I love most then about my garden, is the transformation. Transformation of any kind gives us hope doesn’t it? It’s why we love before and after pictures so much – we want to know that anything is possible, even if we never get round to it. The idea of it is comforting.

Once the basic landscaping had been done, the garden was a bit of a blank canvas. I wondered for a while how on earth I would make it look like an actual garden. How did you make things grow? I wasn’t sure.

My dad and step-mum were brilliant, turning up with a car full of plants and cuttings, but they looked so small. Surely I needed more? How would it ever look like the tropical paradise of my dreams?

Well that showed what I (don’t) know about gardens.

Stuff grows! Who knew?

Another thing I love about the garden is that you can only access it from the side door from the kitchen, up the stepping stones along the side of the house. The garden then reveals itself, like a lovely surprise every time.

Bi-fold doors that open up from the living room at the back of the house into the garden are a long term dream, but in the meantime I’m happy with my little pathway into a tiny paradise.

My favourite spot is the far corner, under the pink pergola, where I have a little quarter circle of patio and a wooden table and chairs, just big enough for doing a little bit of work al fresco or perhaps having a teeny tiny glass of wine after a respectable hour. (Let’s say 1pm?)

It’s not just my favourite spot because it’s the furthest from the house, I promise. I have a honeysuckle in each corner of the pergola and I’m trying to grow them up and over to create a sweet smelling hideout, away from the world.

It’s hard to remember the gravel square now when I step outside and see everything that has been able to grow and thrive in just a couple of years.

Where once was just a grey nothingness, now there’s colour and life. I don’t have many birds, (for some reason the three cats put them off), but I do have masses of bees, butterflies and other insects. I absolutely love it – it’s my tiny square of loveliness, my escape from the world.

If you think you have Britain’s most beautiful garden then go and check out the competition from Just Landlords, a UK-based provider of specialist landlord insurance. The competition will be judged with the help of a special guest judge and there’s a prize of a £250 Love2Shop voucher for the winner.