About


About this blog

Alternative Eden started off as an exotic gardening blog in 2010, documenting our gardening adventures as we developed our garden which has an exotic and tropical theme. It also served as a portal of the progress of our pond build which was completed in the spring of 2013.


Since then our interests have evolved too, beyond gardening and into travel. To see as much of the world with the limited amount of spare time we have from work and maintaining the garden we have created.

Gardening and Travel complement each other perfectly. Gardening hones in on the sense of home, of cultivating ones personal space to be a source of solitude and portal for creativity. Travel however, you get to see what is beyond your usual space and routines. To get an insight of what is out there and take inspiration from. Inspiration that can perhaps be applied to ones own garden and daily living.

Amazing Tokyo
So follow us as we dabble on both sides and anything else in between!



About us

Mark is a full time clinical specialist in apheresis and peripheral blood stem cell collection, and is a facility director of a unit in a large private hospital based in central London.



Gaz is a director for a national accountants and business advisory firm, working to help clients optimise their processes and reporting. His main base is in Northamptonshire but his role frequently takes him all over the country.


Other characters you will find appearing in our blog from time to time are our pets:

Knickers - the oldest and the the only male in the kitty trio, but somehow not at thetop of the pecking order. Still a very handsome cat (in our eyes) and has a beautiful tuxedo.

Twinkles - the middle cat and the one on top of the pecking order. She is also the sweetest of them all, very affectionate and appreciative of cuddles. She often prioritizes cuddles first when she sees us before food, not that this is exceptional! Fluffy and long haired cuteness in the winter, slender and elegant in the summer.





Cotton - the newest and youngest of the trio, full of energy and with bags of character. She is also the noisiest and most vocal of the lot!












No longer with us but not forgotten...

Charcoal - our original garden cat and has appeared on our earliest posts, her memory lives on. She now resides permanently under the second raised bed nearest to the new koi pond so she will be near the fish which we think she would have approved.






And of course a whole host of Koi! And the very reason why we dug such a huge hole and the cause of our hard work for more than two years. We had both kept fish in aquariums when we were younger and had always had a keen interest in fish. When creating the bottom patio area in the garden a raised goldfish pond was planned. This was upgraded to a small koi pond, and gave us the bug to want to expand. Regular readers will be well acquainted with our 8000 gallon koi pond build.




Copyright
All content is copyright of Alternative Eden, however if you wish to refer to any of our posts please do so but ensure they are correctly referenced. If you wish to use any photographs please ask first, and credit them to AlternativeEden.com.