Let your wife loose in the local shopping mall and you end up with a small dent in your credit card, let her loose in southern Spain and you end up with a small cortijo together with 5000 square metres of rock, scrub and weeds – well not weeds as us Brits know them, more the sort of plants that eventually developed into triffids in John Wyndham’s famous book ..... and masses of them.

This is what happened to us in April 2003 when my wife stayed with some friends in nearby La Herradurra, fell in love with Salobrena and sent me a text message saying she had bought our retirement holiday home and she was sure I would like it!

I won’t dwell on the challenges involved in altering and enlarging the cortijo other than to say it was all scheduled for completion by September 2003 when we were due to arrive with an estate car loaded to a capacity BMW would have thought impossible (including a large dog complete with her own passport) to furnish the cortijo and start creating a garden from the wilderness. It goes without saying that, despite all we had been assured by phone and email, the work was not finished, though in fairness to the builders, electricians, plumbers, etc it was eventually completed by the end of November. 

Neither of us could really be described as even amateur gardeners. We had spent the last 22 years living in a town house on the edge of Bristol docks with a small walled rear patio garden and a scrap of green at the front. Our experience was limited to cutting back a few green shrubs twice a year with a hedge cutter, planting fuchsias because I had read that they flowered for months and were easy to maintain (both points correct) and my wife planting bulbs, geraniums and busy lizzies that never seemed to look like they did in the garden centre or the pictures.

Our land in Salobrena is on three terraces and we are about 600 feet above sea level with spectacular views to the front and sides.  The cortijo is on the uppermost terrace and as well as enlarging the house the builders had put in a swimming pool and surrounded it and the house with attractive terracotta tiles. We decided that our first tasks would be to fill the tiled area with pots containing plenty of ‘colour’ and, where appropriate, climbing plants:    to make a really colourful display around the front of the terrace and in the raised bed at the rear:    to plant a lawn so we would have a nice green area adjacent to the pool area: and lastly to somehow disguise the rather grey cliff at our rear.

Next month we will turn to the real purpose of these articles – to report on two over confident UK professionals retiring to Spain with the presumption that “anyone who is prepared to work hard can create a garden” ...... the mistakes they subsequently made through arrogance and ignorance ...... and how some four years later they at last look as if they may have something that, with the help of Mother Nature, will eventually look half decent.

Other articles about Mike and Trudys´ adventures can be seen in our Home and Garden section

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