The prevailing wind is from the south west and it is not without reason that Burnley has a wind farm. The rockery, being humped up, faces all ways, and the slugs hunt in packs.
Over the years we have tried some replanting, but the rockery is undermined by moles, all the bulbs are eaten by mice and our attempts to brighten things up have failed. We have aubrieta, saxifrage and lungwort, but after spring everything reverts to green.We would like to extend the flowering season, brighten the rockery and restore it to its former glory, but we don’t know where to start or what to plant Anything that isn’t rampant seems to fail. We get quite despondent.”Keith and Judith Hartley’s Edwardian semi faces out over the sweeping slopes of Queen’s Park in Burnley, Lancashire. It’s a splendidly civic part of town: hefty park railings are of green-painted cast iron, with gates bearing brightly painted coats of arms, and the houses down the road were once lived in by the park superintendent, the chief of police and the chief of the fire brigade.The rockery – the cause of their despair – is the dominant feature of the front garden, common to the two semis, curving in a wide arc to follow the line of the path from the gate to the two front doors. The mirror layout of the front gardens is charming, each of them marked out in the far corner by a huge, sentinel copper beech. The size of the trees suggests that they must have been planted when the gardens were first made.When the Hartleys moved in, 30 years ago, their neighbours were three spinster sisters, the first owners of the next-door house.

They told the Hartleys that Fred Loads, the founder of the BBC’s Gardener’s Question Time, had had something to do with the rockery. Could he have built it? Possibly, though if he did (he worked for a time in Burnley’s Parks Department) the rockery can’t be the same age as the houses. Fred Loads was born only the year before they were built.If he did make it, then the rockery is more likely to date from the Thirties, which would fit with the craze for all things alpine at that time. Or he may have been called in then to refurbish a rockery originally laid out when the house was built I slightly favour the first theory.

The curving shape would have been part of the original layout, but you would expect it to have been, in 1904, a flat bed crammed with bedding plants, planted in formal ribbons with contrasting borders.The humped shape of the rockery is an advantage, in gardening terms, as it creates two completely different planting areas: one sunny, facing south and west, one chillier and shadier, facing north and east.But the general effect at present is too homogeneous, and Mrs Hartley’s attempts to break up the swathes of saxifrage (a white-flowered, mossy type) and lungwort (not, she says, a particularly exciting one) have failed. The rockery needs defining.One option she had thought of was to transplant some dwarf conifers growing in tubs in the back garden into the rockery at the front. The conifers include a fine, small pine, Pinus mugo, but I thought they would be better left where they are. In open ground, they would grow faster than they have in their tubs and would soon be out of scale with the relatively narrow contours of the rockery.More could be made of the rocks, which have become almost completely covered by big mats of saxifrage and alyssum. As Mrs Hartley said in her letter, these were hefty chunks of sandstone, very handsome, and they had gathered some wonderful mosses and lichens. Uncovered a little, they would sing out and mark off various pockets of planting between them.This done, Mrs Hartley would then have to harden her heart and jettison some plants that she has too much of – and also cut back severely some of those, such as the alyssum, that have become straggly and are overlying their neighbours.