We’ve had rain, we’ve had hail, we’ve had sleet and we’ve had snow. I’ve attempted to get outside whenever there was a small break in the weather, but my hands and toes froze and so I stared at what needs to be done for long periods, got too cold to endure the great outdoors any longer, and scuttled back inside.
Today was better and temperatures reached a tropical 11 degrees! Woo-hoo!
I wandered around the garden with a coffee this afternoon…did a bit more staring and took a few photographs. I think the magnitude of the task ahead is starting to dawn on me. Structure is needed EVERYWHERE; there isn’t a corner of the garden that is yet complete. There are thousands of plants growing in plastic greenhouses (no exaggeration, I’ve been addicted to buying plug plants and bulbs), and two weeks ago I decided to embark on a huge gabion and earth filling project to fill the very steep corner of the garden that was a bit of a no-man’s land and inaccessible. So now I have the biggest mud-pile you’ve ever seen, banks that are half-landscaped and half-full of plants, plants in pots scattered all over the place, an unfinished pathway that looks ugly from the road, and tiny laurel plants trying to hide the disaster.
I’m not a moaner, but I phoned my mother so that she can tell me that it’s not as bad as I think. She gave me the ‘well you can’t make an omelette unless you break eggs’ line and suggested I should get on with some work instead of thinking about it. Good advice mother!
So to put some of this in context, here are some photographs of where I’m at:
This is the new corner bit, with the gabions. I want to create an Italian style garden with this mess, planted with green and white, with a fountain in the middle. I’ve ordered Buxus to cover the gabions on the top and we need to dig a bit more of the bank away to make it more square, and probably put in some sleepers to hold it back.
I was thinking about creating a hobbit-style potting shed in the gap where the trellis is now. It’s very steep and very muddy at the moment, so it would need to be flattened out. I’m not sure if it will be big enough for what I need, especially if this obsession with growing plug plants continues. The type of thing I was thinking of is this:
Yes….I know….ridiculous! But I’m a huge fan of Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter, and I know I won’t be able to do anything exactly like this but I’d love to experiment with a quirky design for a potting shed.
The lower bank has been a problem for a while. It’s so steep that I couldn’t access it to manage the weeding or the plants, I always felt like I was going to tumble off it. Here’s a photo of it before we started landscaping:
Now you may think that doesn’t look too bad from this angle – full of low-growing conifers and weeds.
But when you looked at it from the bottom, it was a mess, with plants out of control, weeds in between them, planted in the wrong places, dead plants that were planted too close to the laurels etc. Here’s a couple of photos:
It was a hard decision to strip it out completely and start again. Some of the plants were very well established, but they hadn’t been nicely trained or clipped because I had struggled to find a gardener for 5 years and I didn’t have the skills to do it myself. We removed 67 plants from this bank altogether. Some of them have been moved to elsewhere in the garden, some have been given away and some were just beyond revival.
The right side of this bank is so steep, I decided to plant the whole thing with laurels to make a sweeping laurel bank that lines the steps. They grow well here, they look good in all weathers (and we have a lot of cold and grey days here) and they don’t require a whole lot of maintenance apart from clipping and feeding with iron periodically.
They’ve only just gone in. Don’t they look tiny! I’ll feed them on the weekend and see if I can encourage a bit of a growth spurt. The weeds may be a problem to keep down here for a while.
To the left of this bank is less steep. My trusty builder, Jiri, has already put some sleepers in to split the bank here, and also added some platforms for urns. The sleepers and platforms have been made using treated wood but I want to paint them black when the weather improves.
I’ve planted Alatus between each of the three urns, a purple berry Heuchera, and I think the other plant is called a Verbena (please correct me if this is wrong). In front of the those plants I’ve planted a load of bulbs in bulb baskets. But Terry Nutkins, the resident squirrel, keeps going there and digging up the baskets. I caught him in the act today and shouted at him, but he chittered and carried on digging at the bulb-basket until he saw me stealthily walking down the steps towards him with a look of contempt. That shifted him!
Behind the sleepers I’ve planted long tubs into the ground. These are full of purple and white Alium of different varieties. They’ve started coming up and Terry Nutkins hasn’t touched them, so fingers crossed they will spring up and look good against the backdrop of the Laurel, because this area is still looking very bare at the moment.
And now for the really messy section of the bank! Jiri has started working on a sleeper wall to hold this part of the bank back because we’ve just had it dug out as part of the gabion project. There will also be steps going down to the next level of the garden.
I’m sure that once this sleeper wall is in, the whole thing will start to look a bit better and far less daunting. I’m tempted to cover that section, when it’s flattened, with false grass. Is this sacrilege? I have no grass anywhere, not a flat area of lawn to be seen, so I don’t want to buy a lawnmower just for a small section and this area will be so small it will be difficult to mow anyway. I also don’t want to really add any extra weight to the bank. I’ll keep thinking about it, and staring at it until I have a brainwave!
The following photographs shows the right side of the upper bank, behind the house, which again is very steep:
This was taken last summer and it still needs some work and plant-shifting to tidy it up. I’d also like to cover the stock-fence behind.
Then we have the steeper end of the upper bank that leads behind the house:
This rises to a height of about 5 metres from the ground, maybe a bit more. It has no paths really and again, I can’t manage it and I don’t feel confident on it. This is next year’s project. Part of me wants to excavate it, although how I’d get a machine in now that I’ve built so many structures, I don’t know. Excavating it by hand seems like too-big-a-task. I think we could gain about 10ft if we excavated it, and it would give us the option of putting a glass structure on the side of the house that could be used as a holiday cottage to rent out, or eventually as a place for my mother and father to stay for long periods as they get older. If we did that, it would need a concrete reinforced wall and that would be a major job. Until I’ve thought about what I’m going to do carefully, I won’t start any work on this bank and just try to keep it maintained a bit better with the help of Trystan, the gardener who started working here at the back end of last year and who is an absolute star when it comes to my hair-brained schemes.
There are many more projects to be done – the pathway, the fencing, all the painting etc, but I hope that gives you a flavour of what the garden looks like and the extent of the work to be done, for now. I’m looking forward to the summer when I hope to be able to show you major changes in both the structural landscaping and the planting.
Welsh Wellies 