The garden

In the beginning, there was only lawn, and then we arrived.

We moved here in the summer of 2009. We came from a rather small garden outside our apartment in Skedsmo, 20 minutes drive south of here. We bought the smallholding because it came with 18 000 m² of land, and we saw the opportunity to make a large garden and start a nursery specialising in the herbaceous plants that we had seen on our travels in Britain.

When we came the garden was a blank canvas. There was a white painted house, a large red barn and a stabbur (A small shed used to store food before the invention of the fridge.) Because we had brought all the plants from our former garden (The new owners preferred a lawn instead.) we had to quickly start planning and planting. Off course there was no trees, so our first task was to plant trees, shrubs and hedges to get them going.

The first areas that we planted was around the house. This is the front garden, which now has turned into a sort of Cottage garden style garden with lots of different herbaceous perennials, bulbs and annuals.

After that we dug a pond, planted a herb garden, a vegetable garden, started planting in the wood garden and made the exotic garden. It didn’t all happen at once. All these things take time, and we learnt some valuable lessons on the way. The most important is possibly to not make more garden than you are able to maintain. We learnt this the hard way.

Now the garden has matured, even though some areas are still quite rough and full of wild plants. We expect that some day we’ll get to them.

The nursery

Since we’re both passionate plantspeople and love propagating plants, having a nursery has always been a dream for both me and Kenneth. The nursery started small, just propagating a few plants from the perennials we grew in the garden. Then it grew. Slowly at first and suddenly we were growing around 800 different varieties of herbaceous perennials. We sell the plants mail-order, from our open garden days and at various plant fairs. As Norway is outside the EU and all plants require a Phytosanitary certificate to be shipped (in and) out of Norway, de do unfortunately not send plants abroad.