Welcome to the Moosbach Garden Blog. The Moosbach Garden is located in the Black Forest in Germany and is at an altitude of 600m. The Moosbach Garden is owned, created and maintained by myself and my partner. We first fell in love with the property in 2013 but it wasn’t until March 2014 that we purchased the property and this is where the story of the Moosbach Garden really starts. I arrived from England on the 1st March 2014 after a 9 hour car journey with our 17 year old cat and 4 chickens, it was bitterly cold and there was no wood to light the fire. My partner arrived from England 3 weeks later and then work began in earnest to lick the place into shape. The garden came with a small hotel and restaurant and as this was going to be our source of income this was our main priority for the first year. I had been a hobby gardener for more than 25 years but had no experience in hospitality, my partner had a similar length of experience in hospitality but not much knowledge of gardening or of plants. The weather here is weather in the extreme and this paired with the topology of the land makes for an interesting combination. When I say that the weather is extreme I really do mean it, in summer it can reach 40 degrees Celsius and in the winter it can be -18 degrees Celsius or lower. Snow is an inevitability here and in the first winter we had 80cm of snow. This was a bit of a shock for me, I grew up in England on the border with Wales and although the winters can be cold we never got that much snow. When we did get snow in England in normally only lasted a few days and then was gone, here it can last for 2 to 4 months, very frustrating for a gardener who wants to get outside and get on with the business of gardening. When we first arrived the garden consisted of a small garden to the West side of the hotel, with steps leading down from the road and bordered by a very old wooden fence on top of an old concrete wall with a path leading down to a terrace in front of the hotel. Friday February 13th was a day that we shall not forget in a hurry, the 80cm of snow had finally melted and I thought to myself “fantastic, I can finally get on with the garden”, how foolish I was. We discovered on our way out to Dinner at a friends house that the wall had collapsed taking with it some apple and pear trees and a pile of debris was all that remained in the field 3 metres below. This was bad enough but then there was an avalanche of snow from the roof of the hotel breaking the hand rail leading up to the kitchen and then my mother in law fell and broke her ankle. Following this eventful day we decided to get quotes from builders and landscape architects to rebuild the wall. However, as everyone knows nothing is ever straightforward. We discovered that underneath the garden on the west side of the hotel was a water way and we were advised that it was too wet to build a replacement wall. The solution was to put in drainage and back-fill the area with soil creating an actual flat piece of garden – what a luxury. It was at this point that we decided to terminate the path leading from the road and to create a small intimate garden space and this is really where the garden story starts. In the next blog I will include some photographs of the early life of the garden.