Ian Midgley enjoys a preview of a one-acre garden that has risen from a muddy sprawl to a delightful haven for flora and fauna before it opens to the public for the first time under the National Gardens Scheme . . .

Robert Scott (left) and Jarrod Marsden in their garden

There’s a sign outside on a door near the patio that reads, with only the tiniest hint of understatement: “When the going gets tough, the tough get gardening.”

It’s a saying that Robert Scott and Jarrod Marsden have got to know well in the past eight years. When they moved into Linden Lodge, near Wilberfoss, set in the rolling foothills of the East Riding Wolds, there was, to put it bluntly, nothing much in the one-acre plot apart from a flat, muddy, sprawl of land.

It’s taken eight years of hard work, months of planning, thousands of hours of manual graft, including installing a rabbit-proof fence around the perimeter and laying 30 tonnes of gravel on the paths – and no small amount of horticultural vision – but the gardens at Linden Lodge are now resplendent with colour and shape as they reach maturity and continue to flourish and develop.

“It has been a lot of hard work,” says Robert who, when he’s not spending every spare hour cultivating his own herbaceous borders or kitchen garden, is the head gardener at York St John University.

It is Robert who has used his technical expertise to transform Linden Lodge from a flat, uninspiring, lawn into somewhere bustling with flora and fauna, but he remains modest about his achievements.

“I think we knew we wanted the place when we first saw it because the garden had such potential. We wanted a place with a large garden and this pretty much ticked all the boxes. It was a blank canvas really.

“I could see what I wanted to do with the place straight away. As soon as we moved in we marked out with canes where we wanted the paths and then went around with a spray can marking where the borders would be.

“I had a picture in my head of what the fully-grown trees and shrubs would look like in five/10/15 years’ time and that’s how it’s turned out. I don’t know if you’d call that my gift or my talent but I’ve always been able to picture how gardens would grow and mature.”

Robert says: “I must have inherited this gift from my father, as he is very artistic and I loved to visit many large gardens and estates as a child, accompanied by him – this must have influenced me in some way.”

Jarrod adds: “It’s been a very clever piece of planning.” An accountant by profession, Jarrod came to gardening through Robert and can now expertly trip through the Latin names of everything in the garden from the Cytisus battandieri, aka the yellow flowering pineapple broom, to the laser-blue Agapanthus and the towering Sequoiadendrum Giganteum – or great Redwood tree – that takes pride of place in one corner of garden. “The beauty of this garden is there’s always something to look at, there’s always a point of interest,” says Jarrod. “The herbaceous borders give all-year-round colour and so do the evergreens and the firs.”

A view of the garden from the wildlife pond

Garden lovers will be able to see the fruits of the couple’s labour when they open the gates to Linden Lodge on Saturday and Sunday, 18th and 19th July, for the first time under the National Gardens Scheme.

The scheme, which has been running since 1927, aims to open up some of the country’s best-kept horticultural oases for wider enjoyment with 3,600, mainly privately-owned, gardens welcoming more than 500,000 visitors every year.

And although this is the first time Jarrod and Robert have opened for the NGS, they are far from strangers from putting their garden on display. In the first year – the pair bought the house in January 2001– the race was already on to open it for the Wilberfoss village open gardens, in June of that year.

“It was a race against time,” laughs Jarrod. “But we managed to give a general impression of what we were planning to do.”

“It can get quite hectic in the run-up to an open garden event,” says Robert. “You do seem to spend every night and every weekend out in the garden furiously working to get everything ready – but it’s worth it,” he says. “It does give you a huge sense of achievement when you sit here and look at how everything has been created out of nothing.”

“It tends to be really busy, especially in the summer months,” adds Jarrod. “We start out early in the year full of enthusiasm and ready to get back out into the garden.”

The summerhouse and pond area at Linden Lodge, Wilberfoss

Robert cites Gertrude Jekyll, arguably one of the best English country garden designers, as his main inspiration.

“For me, she distilled the essence of the English country garden,” he says. “I love her idea of herbaceous borders, the softness of her plantings and the mellow colours – I wanted to achieve some of that here in our garden, such as creating a planting scheme with the blues, yellows and whites in a new border behind the house.”

A tour through Linden Lodge shows Robert and Jarrod have come a long way to achieving that Jekyll-inspired haven.

To one side of the house there’s a formal garden with its trickling water feature and pond, which is stocked with goldfish and golden orfe. Uplighting has been wired-in under the lawn to create a spectacular display of the silver birch (Betula jacquemontii) that anchors the garden in one corner, while indigenous hedging such as hawthorn, yew, hornbeam and beech create a solid line to the garden borders.

A secret hidey-hole is nestled along a snicket around the front of the house, hidden from the road and prying eyes by white flowering wisteria, where Jarrod likes to escape with a cup of tea.

To the bottom fringes of the acre there’s a grassed paddock area where the cream teas and craft stalls will be located during the open days, while the path leading out of it winds through a maturing wooded area.

Emerging from the trees you find plantings of mixed specimen trees, shrubs and herbaceous plants. They are stocked with exploding day lilies (Hemerocallis) and poppies which peer over cheeky gargoyles and carved green men who watch impishly from the borders.

A traditional English summerhouse marks the westerly corner of the garden with its own wildlife pond and bridge, while a trellis arch leads through to the more artisan area of the garden – the kitchen garden.

Here, Robert and Jarrod have created a vegetable and herb garden that would make Tom and Barbara Good envious, stocked as it is with lettuces, different varieties of beans, potatoes, sprouts, cabbages, cauliflowers and many varieties of soft fruit.

The orchard next to it bears everything from apples to pears, cherries and plums while the free-range chickens cluck nonchalantly beneath.

It has been a long, hard eight years, consuming almost every waking hour that Robert and Jarrod have committed to their garden. But looking at Linden Lodge and the vibrant, thriving, wildlife-packed garden it has become, the pair say it’s been time well spent.