Owen Clutton Web Site

Major landscaping, rockery construction and new grass in Newick, East Sussex

This garden belongs to relatives and the need for landscaping it arose after their construction of a swimming pool. That work was carried out in winter and completely destroyed most of the existing garden. However, the excavation uncovered some massive sandstone rocks which we decided to make into an impressive bridge between the raised pool and the lower garden.

The central feature of this rockery is the steps, constructed simply of very large rocks. This type of material is rarely available due to the cost and difficulty of moving it; indeed all of these were placed, with effort, using a mini-digger. The small pond was converted from a brick arbour which they had made previously.

The initial state and layout is difficult to see in the photos, but basically the ground sloped haphazardly away from the pool. We had to move a lot of soil to make the artificial bank and without affecting the pool's support; we also brought in a lot of topsoil from elsewhere in the garden to the effect that the whole lower garden is now about a foot higher than it used to be. We also incorporated drainage into this area before the ground was levelled.

The project took a long time over different stages, mainly due to ongoing foul weather which kept the soil wet. It took two of us two days to lay all of the turf, which amounted to nearly 750 square metres- about 1,000 individual turves! Completed Spring 2001.

New work carried out in 2004 and 2005 is shown at the bottom of the page.

The page relating to a big deck is also in this same garden- it is between the house and the swimming pool.

Further development of woodland carried out much more recently is behind the house in this garden.

If one looks from the house over the pool and rockery, there is a facing bank with a small area of garden above it. This was previously fairly inaccessible. In 2004 I constructed the first set of steps. In 2005 we carried out a bit more work and in order to get a digger up to the raised area (to remove tree stumps) we had to create the ramp seen in the bottom left picture. This seemed an obvious place for a second set of steps which are now in place.