When my sister and I were little and living in Huissen, we were given a small bit of the garden by Mama, so we could ourselves plant some flowers and keep it free of weeds. We were always very busy with it. Mama taught us everything we needed to know about gardening – how you must care for the plants, prune the roses, and that the dahlias have to be taken out of the ground and stored during the winter.

When I went to live at the Waterloseweg with Jerry, Martyn (the owner of the house) was living in London. The garden there was 11 metres wide and a good 35 metres long! At the end of the garden there is the railway with some beautiful large old trees alongside it. And in the garden there was virtually nothing but grass.... I started by mowing the grass. And then after talking to Martyn we moved the garden path... and in fact the terrace also had to be re-laid, and it was given a more playful form and then we planted a border alongside it, with some roses in it.

And Martyn actually wanted a somewhat larger pond, across the entire width of the garden and with a bridge over it! So Jerry did some digging and created a pond lined with pond liner and, yes, a bridge! For the bit of garden on the other side of the pond the easiest thing to do was just to sow some grass seed, until we knew what we wanted to do there. And then the garden had a nice aura. Bit by bit the flowerbeds were laid out and it became nicer and nicer.

And then Jerry and I moved to our own house. I still went on mowing the grass at the Waterloseweg, even though I now had my own garden that needed to be arranged the way I wanted it. There was not really enough time to lay out both gardens any further. After a few years did not go there quite so often as I had other things to do. Only for the annual barbecue that Martyn always has at the end of July did I have a thorough tidy up.

Three years ago my work roster changed and I became free on Monday afternoons. And that gave me new opportunities. On the way home I first called in at the Waterloseweg to work for an hour or so in the garden. And that certainly did the garden good! Now it has beautiful look, completely laid out the way I wanted it. A real party garden, with a fixed barbecue and a place for having a campfire.

Martyn never talks about hís garden... he always talks of Máyke’s garden!