Starting a Design & Landscape Gardening Business in France
by Tracy Campbell of Taylor-Made Gardens
My earliest memories of gardening are of sowing carrot seeds with my dad when he converted my sandpit in the garden into a little veggie patch for me to experiment with. I loved spending time with him in the garden and often used to accompany him when he did some gardening for other people when he wasn’t doing his full time job. This love of gardening stuck with me into adulthood and, whilst I was passionate about plants and loved to learn the Latin names (to this day I struggle with remembering some of the common names for plants) I never planned as a young adult to become a professional gardener but was content to potter in my own garden. I have to hold my hands up and admit that in my 20s and 30s, I much preferred to buy the Gardeners World magazine than Cosmo or suchlike – plants were (and still are) far more interesting to me than clothes! For ten years before I moved to France with my then partner (now husband), I lived in Harrogate within walking distance of RHS Harlow Carr and we spent many happy hours wandering through the gardens (not to mention the time spent in the fabulous attached tea shop and garden centre).
In our Harrogate days, we spent hours discussing how we wanted to change our lifestyle. Our careers meant that we were spending more time on the road and travelling to different countries for work (not nearly half as glamorous as it sounds I can tell you) and spending less time with each other. Friday night was very special as we often didn’t see each other through the week and our weekends became our main reason for living. Now there are 7 days in a week and if you are only enjoying 2 of them, something has to change as it makes for a very short life! We talked and planned, then planned and talked some more. Our initial focus was a move to the country. My husband, Lorne, had spent a very happy childhood growing up on the North coast of Scotland (well, someone has to) and had never been a “townie” and I was desperate to spend more time absorbed in nature. Living in a terraced house in the centre of Harrogate with a tiny postage stamp garden (just a 10 minute walk from M&S and numerous other shops, bars and restaurants) was no longer what we wanted.
We decided that we wanted to swap the convenience of town living for the healthier option of country living and on top of that, we wanted a total lifestyle change and to be our own bosses. All sorts of ideas were mooted from a B&B aimed at SCUBA divers (I am a qualified diving instructor) on the West coast of Scotland to a tea room/gift shop in the Scottish Highlands. Then Lorne broke the news to me – he didn’t want to go back to Scotland – “too cold, too much rain”. He wanted to move to France and had wanted to do so years before we met. “No way” was my initial reaction –“ we can’t speak French” (other than my “O” level French and an adult conversation course many years ago) and I couldn’t move to a foreign country…..or could I?
Lorne’s powers of persuasion must have been good as I came round to the idea quite quickly (I can be a little stubborn) and we started planning again but this time for France. We decided to buy a holiday home which had potential for renovation and development whilst we decided what we would do to earn a living as retirement was, and still is, a long way off. We discussed the obvious gite and tea shop options but it just didn’t hit the spot for us. Sitting in the new Bettys tea room at Harlow Carr drinking coffee and eating lemon drizzle cake, the solution hit me like a bullet between the eyes. It was so obvious; I had spent years pottering in the garden, reading gardening magazines and books, visiting garden centres (I think I kept the Chatsworth Garden centre well in the black when I lived in Sheffield close to the Derbyshire border) and Lorne had spent his holidays as a student and then mature student working on farms and the ground maintenance department at his local power station and so was more than familiar with the machinery involved. We reckoned that we had a good sound knowledge of gardening between us but knew that we needed more in order to establish ourselves as a credible business. That’s when I decided to enrol on a 2-year City and Guilds garden design course at Askham Bryan agricultural college based in York and Harrogate. By this time, we had bought our house in France and so spent the next 3 years preparing for the big move – getting qualified in garden design, selling our house in Harrogate and spending every holiday possible in France getting familiar with life here and doing some DIY on our French property (with me blubbing like a baby in the car every time we left to go back to England, I knew that there was no going back and that France was our destiny).
I’m not even going to start to discuss the hoops we had to jump through to get our business started but here we are, 5 years on from when we first moved here with a business ticking along nicely. We decided on Taylor-Made Gardens as a name for the simple reason that I was a Taylor before I became a Campbell and it was a good way to carry on my family name after I married. It’s not all a bed of roses (if you will pardon the pun) and we have had to make sacrifices. Family is never far from our minds and we do miss the exotic diving holidays of our previous life but we are far happier now.
Our main focus is on the design and landscaping side of the business as that is where our passion lays but we do also have a fair number of maintenance clients and I find pruning particularly relaxing! We have created various types of gardens from scratch including a sub-tropical courtyard, geometric town garden, low-maintenance holiday home gardens, and Mediterranean style swimming pool gardens and have planted more hedges, trees and low-maintenance beds than I can remember off the top of my head. As well as designing and creating totally new gardens, we also take great delight in restoring gardens that have been left untended and unloved. Some examples of our work are shown below but more can be seen on our website at www.taylor-madegardens.com :-
Courtyard garden with a Sub-Tropical Theme
When we first viewed this 8 m x 9 m garden, it was just full of gravel and nothing much else. We designed and created the garden you see below to the client brief of lush planting with space for a bench, a terrace for seating up to 6 for dining and a water feature. All of this in just a 72 m2 space was no easy task but we (and our clients) are delighted with the outcome.
Before
All of the materials including topsoil, oak beams, sand, cement etc. had to be brought in via the gate above the stone steps which in turn was accessed from a very narrow side road only just wide enough to accommodate our Ford Transit. It was back breaking but so rewarding in the end. The following photos show the garden just 2 months after we finished creating it – almost an instant garden.
After
Low maintenance holiday home garden
This garden needed to be designed as relatively low maintenance as the clients are only able to get over to their property one weekend per month and 2 to 3 times per year for a longer break. The garden was quite bumpy with rough grass, a lot of weeds and overgrown trees at the bottom and one side of the garden.
Before
We created a design with two small circular lawns (easy to mow with a hand mower) connected by an “S”-shaped gravel path and surrounded by low maintenance plants. An archway was installed at the bottom of the garden after pruning out the overgrown trees to use the adjoining field as “borrowed landscape” and to give the feeling of the garden being bigger than it actually is.
After
The photographs were taken almost one year after creation so it didn’t take long at all to become an established garden. Now instead of fighting the overgrown weeds and grass with a strimmer for half of their holiday, the clients can potter and enjoy their garden.
If you want to see more of our work, please visit our website at www.taylor-madegardens.com or contact us to discuss your gardening needs using one of the following methods:-
Lorne & Tracy Campbell (C & G Garden Design)
Address
Taylor-Made Gardens
Chez Callois
16310, MASSIGNAC
SIRET: 497 756 866 00016
Site Internet: www.taylor-madegardens.com
Telephone
Portable: (Lorne) 06 13 84 75 78
Portable: (Tracy) 06 17 37 64 64
Home/office: 05 45 21 69 63 / 09 64 37 67 63
lorne.campbell@orange.fr
