The Ha-ha
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Creating the ha-ha
A ha-ha is an English garden feature, used in country estates to make a barrier to farm animals. It gives the illusion that the lawns extend into the fields uninterrupted. We don't have a country estate but we built a ha-ha!
Bill built a dry stone wall up to the level of the lawn in the gardens, using a seasonal stream bank as his guide. The stones had been gathered from a stream at the edge of our bush. He built this wall as part of his cardiac recovery
programme, with permission from his cardiac specialist!
Earth from a field was backfill behind the wall. Turf from this field created a “lawn”.
Bill screened the soil from a nearby garden of irises and tulips so he could weed out Lady's Bells, a garden thug. We garden on an ancient beach so it is necessary to screen out the stones before the soil is amended and the garden replanted.
The gardens appear to merge with the mown Nature Trail in the field. The stone wall and the stream are not apparent!
The mown strip of field grass is part of a Japanese landscaping technique called ‘borrowed scenery’. Your eye is drawn away from the gardens to the distance.
Here's an early winter view, looking into the gardens from the Nature Trail The seasonal stream is flowing. The height of the ha-ha wall and the bank of the stream illustrates the barrier to farm animals.
