St Dominic, Tamar Valley: The last gardener of this steep ground made a living from its five and a half acres. Now only a few daffodils remain from that period of intense cultivation
Primroses flower beneath a tangle of brambles on the sun-warmed hedge at the bottom of a former market garden in the Cleave valley. Chunks of wood and brash (rough-cut branches) strew the south-facing slope, interspersed with frost-withered hart’s-tongue, self-sown ash, and plastic tubes guarding deciduous saplings. The National Trust and volunteers are planting these to replace larch felled because of the threat of disease (Phytophthora ramorum). Thirty-year-old tree trunks have been dragged out and carted away for chipboard, stakes and firewood. Others are being burned in the woodchip boiler that heats a nearby glasshouse nursery.