So here I am, a gardening novice, with a challenge on my hands and a budget of zero. Ah yes, the small matter of a global economic down turn. Six weeks ago, after all the hassles of moving and buying a house at the peak of the market, I was given the choice of redundancy or part time work. Any job, even a part time one, is better than no job at all and that brings me, after a long meander through three other posts, to the reason for this blog. A part time job gives me the opportunity to work in the garden and to document what I do but no money to indulge in the plants I'd like. So there will be some advertising on this blog, not too intrusive I hope, and if any pennies are earned they will be used to bring new plants and pleasure to this gormless gardener.

I loved that little garden, with all it's beautiful birds and butterflies, but eighteen months ago my job brought me back to Argyll, close to where I grew up and to a very different garden, the one in the title of this blog. A plot four or five times bigger than I had been used to, set in three tiers on a boggy Argyll hillside, with a stream running down one side and a midge population of a number, size and persistance that only the West of Scotland can breed. I will sound mad when I tell you I bought the house because of the garden, but I did. I stood on the mossy lawn and looked out over the rowan and silver birch towards the loch and decided this was for me.

Did I mention cats? Ah yes, this is Smudge the Incontinent, variously known as Old Podge, La Grande Incontinenta or "that effing cat". She came to me from CPL, as an eight year old. She is sixteen now, so has been with me for most of my gardening life, supervising, digging and watering, in what she imagines is a most helpful manner. Her saving grace is that she doesn't chase birds. Too old? Too lazy? Too toothless? Doesn't matter. The important fact is she has never shown the slightest interest, so I can feed them with a clear conscience.

How to start? Why this blog? I’m not a professional gardener, nor even a proficient one. I am, in fact, almost completely ignorant. A dibbler and a dabbler, but I love it. I have been gardening for nine years. My first garden was a tiny, little, handkerchief-sized plot of builder’s rubble, overlaid with a centimetre of topsoil, in central Scotland. It suffered while I learnt things like: don’t plant camellias in the driest spot you have; slugs are the indestructible minions of Satan; that grey, furry stuff on your expensive, fancy honeysuckle is a fungus which will kill it; dunnocks and cats love seed beds, for different reasons, but the end results are the same.