When we purchased our house in The Tarn three years ago, not only had we noted the garden was divided by a five-foot-high stone wall but the wall, which ran from the house down to the bottom of the garden, had something in the region of a 12 degree list.

That section of the garden contained a rockery with steps, a pond with a flagstone surround and the main area designated as a kitchen garden. We grew some produce over the first two summers but upon returning from holiday last July, Ellie decided the garden was a waste of time. We were on holiday when the vegetables were at their peak.

“Without going mad, make it a garden,” she suggested, fearing such an instruction was a red rag to a bull, for I love landscaping.

I always enjoyed the Dustin Hoffman film Little Big Man in which he reflected he had various eras in his life. “That was the end of my Gunfighter Era,” he observed at the end of one scene. I have had various eras to my life, sometimes dictated by my residences but, of all of them, the end of my boarding school era was the only one I celebrated. I worked in insurance, on computers, as a general news reporter, a sports reporter, sports editor and then columnist and nostalgia buff. At one stage I enjoyed a Landscaping Era in my 20s and later, I had a Golfing Era.

Looking at the garden last summer, I decided the terrace and pond would be left untouched but a friend, commenting on the listing wall, offered the view that he would not be happy to let his grandchildren play near that wall, in case it toppled on them. So I opted to half the height of the wall, knocking off the stones with a club hammer. I also planned to demolish the wall at the lower part of the garden so as to open everything up as one complete garden.

Once I had gained the grudging agreement of Her Indoors, I set to work and I was immediately lucky. Our friends John and Iza called around, saw the rubble and expressed great enthusiasm for the hardcore for their proposed paths. So that solved that problem as we scooped it up and transported it in a number of containers over the weeks.

I knocked down the wall and throughout the early autumn I cleared the area of debris, keeping the major stones. I then commenced to dig down some 2ft 6ins to link up to the main pond, which had ended at the wall. Now the way was clear to extend the pond and make it over 15 yards in total length.

Mentally, as November passed the halfway mark, I envisaged the pond being dug by early December. I could lay out the rest of the area with flower beds and gravel paths and when the spring and warmer weather arrived, I could then link up the pond liners with glue and by mid-April it would be finished.

That was the theory but I reckoned without three factors. The first was the weather, which provided rain for most of November, December, January and February, so limiting the opportunity to dig and rendering the occasions, when I could resume the project, somewhat trying as the earth was heavy. The second problem was clay. There was some nine inches of it on top. Then there was earth for about 15 inches before we hit clay again. I ended up digging the entire area of the garden six metres by nine to a depth of two foot, extracting the earth and then filling the holes with clay. I did this in the areas where I had not scheduled anything more than gravel paths.

The third problem was that my concept was not original. Obviously at some stage in the property’s 165-year history, there had been some excavations and so the area where I planned to excavate for the pond extension was filled to a depth of one metre with hard core and clay.

So more holes were dug, earth extracted and clay buried, in the breaks between the almost constant rain.

“You should not be doing this sort of work at 73,” Ellie informed me and I agreed. Had I known it would be this much of a problem I would have hired a mini-digger.

The only lucky break was that John and Iza were delighted with the extra source of hardcore. I just wish they had also been in the market for clay.

I planted out the large flower beds, which were rich and deep trenched with good earth and in April I connected up the new extension with the main pond. I glued the liners for much of the morning and was rewarded with a lack of leaks when the water ran into it as I pumped it from the culvert, which takes the water from the mountain streams through and under the gardens and thence by pipe to the main river.

Then I covered the areas between the pond, beds and the fences with two thicknesses of black polythene and unloaded a few trailers full of gravel and spread it over while consoling myself with each barrow-load that from now on, as at the other extremity of the garden, which had been similarly gravelled, the maintenance would be low.

I staggered indoors on Thursday, May 14, happy but exhausted, knowing the project had been finished, albeit the physical work taking some two months longer than expected.

I think it looks the part, with the stones surrounding the pond and flower-beds. The Koi carp seem to be enjoying it and Ellie is impressed. All of which is just as well, because while Ellie hopes I might enter a Cooking Era, that is the end of my second and final Landscaping Era.