It's a far cry from the east Belfast terrace where Sammy Wilson used to live back in his teaching days.

But for the last five years, the Environment minister has spent every weekend armed with a spade in a labour of love that has seen two fields transformed into an ambitious garden.

The minister threw open the garden gates to the Belfast Telegraph to reveal how he has created not only a series of magnificent herbaceous borders on a steep slope overlooking the rolling Co Antrim countryside, but also an extensive fruit and vegetable garden and even a small forest with a stream running through it.

It’s the first time he has ever had a garden of his own, the minister revealed.

“I’ve always wanted a garden because I had lived in a terraced house and when I saw these fields I though I could make a great garden out of them,” he said.

Mr Wilson has grown his own fruit and vegetables for years on an allotment in Belmont, but the seeds of this passion were sown years earlier when he was reluctantly pressed into service by his father to help tend his granny’s garden.

‘The first thing I did was plant trees along here on my first Christmas Day in the house’

“My father first got me interested in gardening — although it was an enforced interest when I was young,” he said.

“I used to hate it when I was a wee lad. But now I find it very relaxing. A lot of this stuff I just picked up as I went along.”

When Mr Wilson moved to the house five year ago, it was surrounded by fields with barbed wire fencing and grazing sheep.

The first step was to bring in tonnes and tonnes of topsoil, level out the field and build a masonry wall.

“Then the first thing I did was plant trees along here on my first Christmas Day in the house,” he said.

“I’d always wanted to have a wee forest attached to my house. I put some paths round it in the summer and then found there was a pipe with water running out which goes to a spring. So I dug along there and made a wee river.

“I was able to dig a channel down through the forest and made a wee pond. I planted bullrushes in there and they have taken the pond over.”

He added: “I always try to spend some of Saturday afternoon or Sunday in the garden. I would sometimes bring my radio down and weed.”