Catching up

It’s been nearly a month since my last blog post and I’m in catch-up mode.  Jiri the builder has gone to my neighbour’s to finish her project before returning here, so there’s been very little happening on the garden construction front.  But!  I have at last managed to sort out the gable end of the house where there was still a patch of old render that needed to come off and then the stone pointed underneath.  I had to get scaffolding, but we took full advantage of it to paint the windows too, and also take some birds-eye view photos of the valley surrounding us as it becomes lush and green.

The weather has been rain, rain and a bit of shine.  During the ‘shine’ days I gave the Anne Hathaways shed two coats of Ty Mawr Limewash Red Tint, to give it a soft pink colour.  I may give it one more coat, but I’m pleased with the result so far:

 

The plants are loving this inconsistent weather, and they’re doing quite well.  The Dahlias are growing great-guns, and I’ve kept to my purple, white and pink colour scheme.  I had to cover the beds with mesh and wire to keep the cat off them, and I’ve been out picking slugs and snails every night to protect them as much as possible.  Quite a few frogs have moved in around the Dahlia beds, so that’s good news in dealing with the slug problem.

 

I’m very pleased with how the Aliums have grown.  They are actually supposed to be purple and white, so I don’t know what has happened to the white ones!  But they’re on my shopping list for the Autumn and next year I’ll try growing at least 3 times the amount.  I’ve planted them in troughs in the ground, hidden behind the sleepers.  This means I’ll be able to lift them out after they’ve finished flowering and store them.  I’m not sure what to replace them with yet though.

Behind the single sleeper platform that I created to the right of the bank (that isn’t yet painted black because I ran out of paint), I’ve put in two rows of Verbena. They’re also doing tremendously well and you can now see them peeping over the sleepers. (apologies for the quality of this photo, it was raining!)

The Lupins were doing well until yesterday, when the strong winds took one of the heads off and bent another.  I’m hoping I can save the bent one, and I’ve moved it into the folly for shelter and added supports.  These winds have wreaked quite a bit of havoc around here in the last few days!

 

I’ve done a bit of work on the bottom bank.  Turned over the hard clay with a pick-axe, filled the steps with chippings, and planted the Buxus in groups of three, then further groups of three (in a sort of triangle shape).  These will eventually become triple box balls in front of each of the urn platforms.  They look tiny at the moment though.  I’ve also planted the Choisya either side of the Alatus that is place in the middle between each urn.  Jiri needs to make two further urn platforms and hopefully he’ll be here next week to do that.

 

In the middle of the Choisya, I want to plant a Phormium Back in Black.  This is a special variety that was found in North Wales by Seiont Nurseries.  It only grows to 60cm and it’s quite hardy, but I have no doubt I’ll have to over-winter it.  To make that easier, I’m going to plant the pots in the ground, and then lift them up before the first frost in the winter.  I’m having a hell of a job finding the plant though.  I’ve contacted Seiont Nurseries who told me to buy them from Burncoose, but Burncoose aren’t making them available until November and that’s too late because I want to see how they perform here.  Seiont seemed reluctant to sell to me directly, despite the fact I’m based quite near them and I could easily collect.  I’ve managed to find one company that does them and they are £30 each and fully grown – not what I wanted really because I think they would benefit from growing a bit here in this climate.  I did consider a few other black plants but it’s the difference in foliage I’m after – I don’t even like Flax that much but I think it will work in the bed.  So I probably need to bite the bullet, pay the £30 each and then promise myself I won’t buy more plants for a while because I need perhaps 5 of them.

I’ve got the black Heuchera growing in the growhouses that will go at the front of this bed.  They seem to be doing ok at the moment.  And although I had originally planned to put Lavender between the Phormium and the Heuchera, I’m now thinking either Nepeta (catmint) or purple Salvia.  I’ve bought 5 Nepeta Walkers Low already, but as soon as I got it home, the cat threw himself in the bag of plants and it was a bit of a job to get him out – he was clinging to the bag like his life depended on it.  These could therefore cause me a bit of a trouble in the bed, and I want to try to keep him off it if I can.  So it may well be the Salvia route!  I decided not to use Lavender because I can never grow them successfully here and they tend to die after the first year because the sticky, clay soil seems to be too compacted and water-logged around their roots.

So fingers cross a bit more activity next week, and I’ll leave you with a photo of what’s growing in the grow-houses at the moment:

 

 

Eurovision and clearance

Another weekend of glorious weather here in North Wales.  I’d intended on getting some more plants potted on and clearing up the potting area a bit on Saturday, and then settling down to watch the Eurovision Song Contest with my family and a neighbour during the evening.  About 11am on Saturday I heard the front door open and the familiar voice of my best friend who had decided to travel up from South Wales and pay us a visit to join us for the evening of Eurovision.  A lovely and unexpected surprise!

Not having a garden of his own at the moment, my friend was keen to get outside with me and help do some gardening until the competition started.   He potted-on hundreds of Ixia, Achillea Cassis and Alium Moly into different pots for me.  These bulbs were all part of free collections I’d received with orders from jparkers over the last 6 months and they’re all growing well.   I then dished out some of the pots to my neighbours because I’m not going to have room for all of these bulbs and some of them don’t fit the planting scheme I’m planning.  The neighbours are in the same boat as me – creating gardens from scratch and planning their schemes more carefully, so it was a mutually beneficial exercise as chose the plants that would fit with their schemes, and I gained some much-needed space in the little grow-houses and on the back-patio.

We also got the rest of the Dahlias planted, and crossed-fingers there will be no more frosts now.  I’d pre-soaked them and I’ve tried to plant them in a way that spreads the dinner-plate Dahlias evenly throughout the two Dahlia-borders.   I ended up with far too many for the borders, so I’ve planted some up in large pots and I’ll dot them around the seating areas.  I’m so excited to see them grow this year!

Last year it was a complete fluke because I’d received 12 tubers free with an order and thought I’d give them a go, having never grown them before.  They were all orange and yellow and they were amazing!  Lots of walkers commented on them because they gave me such a display you could see them clearly from the road.  The display continued until early November, when I dug them up and stored them according to instructions on one of Monty Don’s tutorial videos on You Tube.

So this year I am more prepared!  I’ve bought lots of plant support sticks and Dahlias to fit in with the garden’s colour theme.  I chose a mixed purple and white collection, some large white ones, some huge aubergine-coloured ones and a few cerise pink.

The cat seems to like to use the Dahlia beds as a toileting area, so for the moment I’ve covered the beds with chicken wire to keep him away.  He’s most put out and after I’d done it he went to sit in the kitchen and wouldn’t look at me!

We came in from the garden about 6pm to prepare ourselves for Eurovision and do the one-hour round trip to get a take-away.  Lucie Jones, who is from Pentyrch in Wales, did well in representing the UK in the competition and she actually took us over 100 points.

On Sunday my friend left early and my partner and I decided to have a day clearing up in the garden.  We cleared out Anne Hathaways shed, burnt lots of rubbish, cleared the patio and hosed it down, cleaned pots, moved 16 bags of compost into what is going to be the sunken garden, and moved a ton of gravel into some of the new sleeper steps to fill them up.

We also unpacked the fountain that is going to go into the sunken garden and it is huge! We’re going to need 3 people to move the bottom bowl of it down to the lower levels, and even the standing base is too heavy for one person.  It won’t be installed for at least a month but I wanted the weather to get at it a bit, to make it look less ‘new’.

We were exhausted after the day’s work and whilst we were pleased with our efforts, it still looks like a bit of a building site by the parking area, because this is where the builders merchants deliver all the materials.  There are still piles of sleepers, bags of hardcore, wood to make the platforms, parts of the fountain and some pallets.  I can’t wait to get it cleared, but I’ll have to be patient.

Tomorrow, a decorator is coming to climb the scaffold outside and paint the fascia board and 3 windows before the wall can be finished off with the pointing.  Apparently the weather this week is going to be a lot of rain and some sunshine, so hopefully that will spring the Dahlias into action and we should see some growth.

He’s digging it

Jiri is back after having to rest his shoulder and neck for 3 weeks.  It’s good timing because the weather has been glorious and there hasn’t been a drop of rain all week.

He has dug out more of the excess earth in what is going to be the sunken-garden, put up a low sleeper wall and built some steps.

Now there’ll be another two week break while he does some work for my neighbour in order to help her get a structure ready for summer gardening.  But he has left me with some stuff I can get on with, including shifting some of the earth into the empty steps to build them up ready for topping off with chippings, and also I can paint the woodwork that has just gone in.  Yes…more black!

Trystan is coming next week for two days gardening.  I want him to spend one day on the roadside verge, working with me to rake it, add some nutrients and compost, put some grass seed down with wildflower seeds, and also plant some of the spring bulbs I have no use for in the garden but they’ll be bee-friendly on the roadside next year.

On the second day he’s with me, we can work on the bottom bank.  Something has gone very wrong with the fir that has been planted there happily for years.  We’re not sure whether it is because all the plants have been taken out and structures put in, but I don’t think so because the structures have been there for a while now and the plant was healthy until about 4 weeks ago.  Interestingly, another plant (that I thought was a Laurel but it isn’t), has also started to deteriorate near the fir.

In this photo it looks even worse than it does in real-life!   It has to go, so that’s one of the jobs for next week.

Contrastingly, the Alatus growing in front of each sleeper section has suddenly sprung into action after being dormant for well over a year.

The purple and white Alium that are planted in troughs dug into the ground behind the sleepers are also doing really well.  They look healthy and strong and I can’t wait to see them flower.

I’ve had moderate luck with the black and white Tulips in the triangular bed by my son’s parking area.  I say moderate because I didn’t plant enough, and I’m sure the cat used the bed as a litter box and destroyed some too.  So now the impact is a bit…..’meh’ and not what I’d hoped.  I’ll try again next year, and treble the amount of tulips at least.

 

One of the things I am pleased with is how Anne Hathaway’s shed has turned out after using Ty Mawr Limewash Paint on it.  I’ve only given it two coats of ‘Strong Red Tint’ and it’s already nearly the colour I was looking for.  Perhaps one more coat will do it.

There are Aquilegia plants popping up everywhere, including some large ones at the front of the shed.

I had planned on putting two Hydrangea here, the Black Steel Zaza variety that are purple and blue with black stems.  They arrived from dutchbulbs.co.uk safely enough and they were very healthy…until….the good old frost.  I am kicking myself because I was keeping them in the growhouse and then on a beautiful day last week, I took them out and left them outside.  That night we had a very bad frost and it went down to minus 2, and by the morning they had blackened.  There are some new shoots on them, so perhaps they’ll come back, but I’ll have to wait and see.  Perhaps they’re not the right plant for our weather conditions here – I don’t really want to mollycoddle plants in a garden that is going to be difficult enough to maintain as it is, but I’ll see if they can be revived.

There is rain forecast tomorrow and for the weekend, but I’m hoping to get out and pot some plants on to make some room in the growhouses ready for a delivery of summer bulbs.

 

 

 

Black, black and more black

I love painting things black!  Always have, since I was a child when I insisted on having a black bedroom.  When I became interested in history and historical architecture, my fondness for its use in interiors was cemented and I like nothing more than seeing elaborate Georgian and Edwardian black furniture, wallpaper and painted walls.

But I know this penchant for black isn’t common, and there is a bit of a fear of using the colour in interiors and gardens.  When I painted my kitchen island black, I had lots of comments from my friends who thought I was doing the wrong thing.  Even the decorator, before he put the paint on the wood, said ‘now are you sure you want me to do this?’

So last week I started painting all the sleepers and Buxus-beds that Jiri has put in the garden so far, black.  I used Sadolin Ebony for exterior woodwork and it goes on really well.  I didn’t escape the comments from passers-by – I clocked up six ‘oh!  you’re painting it black’, said in deflated tones as though I was ruining everything.  My response to the first exclaimant went into a detailed rationale about the use of black during the period the house was built, how black can accentuate the colours of plants and foliage, and how I like the use of flow from the interior to the exterior.  By the time the sixth person made a comment, and by this time I’d been painting for over 8 hours, then my response was just ‘yes’ and I carried on dabbing with my brush.

To date I’ve used 7.5 litres of paint, so the sleepers are certainly sucking it up.

I’m a bit stuck now because until more of the sleepers are installed, I can’t do much else. I’m unable to reach the woodwork at the back and top of the gabions and this is going to require the wily acrobatics of Trystan, the gardener who comes every fortnight, to finish painting those areas for me.  Essentially there’s been another week of inactivity in the building works, because Jiri injured his neck last week and he’s still not recovered.  He’s been advised to rest it until Monday, at which point I hope he’s back because I really need to get going on the planting if we’re going to see any major progress this year.

So as well as the painting, I’ve potted on lots of plants that have been growing in the plastic grow-houses.  The ones that I lost after the frosts include Lavender Hidcote, Gaura Sparkle White, most of the Erigeron and all of the Monarda.  They’re ones I probably won’t bother trying with again because I think it’s just too cold for them here.

The Alatus has sprung into life after 12 months of being dormant single twigs, so I’m pleased about that:

Still a long way to go until they’re the bright pink beauties seen in the catalogues, but at least there’s some growth.

The Aliums are doing amazingly well at the back of the sleepers too.  As long as they remain a success, I’ll plant a lot more of them for next year.  I can’t wait to see them all come up, but I want to do a bit of tidying up of that area and remove a lot of the building materials, so they can be fully appreciated.

I’m really looking forward to planting the Dahlias.  But I can’t yet because even though we’re nearly at the end of April, we’ve had snow showers here over the last two days.  I’ll see what the weather is like on the weekend and perhaps it will be warm enough to pot them and put them in the growhouses outside.  We’re a month late here with everything!

 

 

Bottom bank – revisiting where we have got to so far and a bit of progress

Now that the weather has got a bit better, we’ve been working on the bottom bank.  So if you remember from the previous posts, this is what it looked like before we started – overgrown and unkempt, and definitely lacking in any structure:

We started by stripping out most of the plants, removing the stones and debris, and giving it a thorough weeding.  It was a bit strange to take out all of the plants that I’d been filling the bank with for years.  But many of them were wrong for the space, or really prickly and ‘unfriendly’.

The next thing was to divide up the space on the bank.  I wanted to put in a line of sleepers to sort of divide the bank in half.  I also fancied having some platforms for urns, so that I could plant something like evergreen topiary in them.

It’s still a bit rough around the edges at the moment.  The sleepers need staining, but I’ll wait until all the woodwork has been done to do that.  Also, I temporarily planted some Iris in the urns for the spring, but I’ll replace them with Box soon, so that I can grow it on and shape them into Box balls.

After Jiri put the sleeper partitions and platforms in, he set to work on new steps that would lead from the top of the bank to the bottom.  The steps we had were made from decking, and they were slippery and quite dangerous – you can just about see them in this photograph:

Jiri ripped these steps out and replaced them with sleeper frame steps, infilled with chippings.  These are so much safer and they seem to have settled beautifully in the landscape:

We then added a row of Box hedging to the right side.  I’m hoping these will grow to the extent that we can shape them into a neat hedge running down the side of the steps:

And to the left of the steps, where the bank is at its steepest, we have planted a load of Laurels.  I’d like these to grow and cover that part of the bank completely, because it’s so difficult to navigate and manage.  At least with the Laurels, we’ll only have to trim them a few times a year and it will make the management of this section of the bank a lot easier.  They’ve got a lot of growing to do though!:

I’ve continued to make some mistakes on this bank, mainly by planting too few shrubs and planting some spring bulbs which have grown too small to see because of the height of the  posts that currently hold up the bank.  Terry Nutkins the squirrel has been at the bulbs, and he dislodged the bulb-baskets and they are now growing ‘awkwardly’, so they look a bit of a mess.  Once they’ve finished flowering, we’ll remove them and do this section properly.

So here is my planting plan for the bank:

I’ve tried to use a repetitive planting and colour scheme across the bank.  The plants that I’ve chosen for the scheme so far are:

• Heuchera (purple)
• Lavender (lilac)
• Buxus (green)
• Black Phormium (the variety that has been cultivated by Seiont Nurseries in North Wales)
• Choisya Goldfinger (if I can grow them here, because I haven’t had much luck with two I’ve tried already)
• Euonymous Alatus (green, turning to pink)
• Azalea (white)

So the scheme is basically greens, purples, blacks and whites, which a hint of pink here and there.

At the back of the sleeper row I’ve planted 150 purple and white Alium bulbs, slightly different varieties.  These are planted in long troughs and half-buried behind the sleepers.  They’re coming along quite well:

And Jiri has started the small set of steps on the part of this bank that hadn’t been tackled at all.  I think he’ll finish these steps today:

They will lead down eventually to the sunken garden at the bottom.  We have made some progress with that part too, and Jiri has built about 50% of the framing around the edges. There’s a bit more digging out to do before he can finish the rest, so he’s focusing on the steps instead.

To get some of the Box hedging in and started off, Trystan came last weekend to plant up the frames.  I’m pleased with how it’s coming together:

So that’s about half of the Box planted.  The rest will have to stay in pots for now until the frames are built.  It does seem like Box overload here at the moment, but I want the finished result to be part formal and part informal, and I think Box hedging will help achieve that formal style.

Hopefully more to post later today if the weather is good and Jiri is able to work outside!

There is movement!

So…since my last post, there has been a bit of movement here in the garden.  Jiri has managed to come for a few days here and there, and continue his work on the planned ‘Italian sunken garden’ at the bottom of the bank.

He’s finished the two sleeper walls that hold up the top part of the bank.  It was quite complicated because the sleepers were uneven, and so rather than build up from the bottom, he had to start from the top to keep any resulting ‘unevenness’ at the bottom of the wall where it won’t be seen.  This area is going to need a set of steps running to the next layer, but I think he wants to create the ‘square edge’ running around the sunken garden first.

 

Jiri has also built a sleeper wall in front of two of the gabions.  Gradually this section will be boxed in with sleeper walls, and they will form the edges for the steps to the Italian sunken garden, and also they’ll form the edge of a bridge that will lead over to the decked platform.

 

Over the last couple of days he’s made good progress with preparing the low wood-frame boxes that will hold the Buxus plants and form an edge to the gravel path.  (This will also prevent people from going to the edge of the gabions and risk falling down a deadly drop to the bottom).

 

We managed to salvage some 6×2 wood planks for the Buxus framing, and then I bought some lengths of 6×1 tanalised wood for the front edges.  A pole has been inserted where the gabions meet in the left corner – this is the beginning of the trellis frame that will eventually be at the the back of the garden.

This work will carry over to next week because Jiri is going on a well-deserved mini-break in Snowdonia, to recover from the lambing season and all the digging he’s been doing here.  Also….I’ve run out of wood, and a lot more digging needs to be done on the bank to shift some of the soil away.  If the weather holds over the weekend, this is something that I can do, and also Trystan is coming on Thursday to plant some Buxus in the beds, so perhaps he can do a bit of digging too.  The way I’m seeing it at the moment is that every bucket of earth removed, helps!

Plants-wise, well we’re always about a month behind everyone else here, because of the micro-climate in the village and we’re in the North.  The black and white bed of Tulips we’ve planted seem to be doing well, and I’m surprised the mice or Terry Nutkins the squirrel haven’t got at them.

The summer Heather has really started a beautiful show on the top bank, and I think I’ll get some more white and lilac ones to go with it.  I’d love a Blue Heather, but I’m not sure if that even exists so I’ll do some research.  This bank needs a bit of a tidy-up, so that’s a job for next week.

 

Purple Primula have popped up everywhere and I’m not sure where they’ve come from because I don’t remember planting any!

And I’ve had great success with the two Hyacinth bulbs that came free with an order from JParkers last year:

For the next post I’ll publish some plans I’ve been making for the bottom bank.

Lots of inactivity

The last fortnight has been a bit frustrating because of lack of landscaping activity in the garden.  The inactivity is simply the result of timing as it is lambing season here, and Jiri who is the ‘all-rounder’ in the village and who can turn his hand to anything, including landscaping,  is busy helping out with the lambing on the farm where he lives.

The biggest frustration is that I ordered 200 Buxus plants to be planted in the developing sunken garden, and they all arrived!  Instead of being able to plant them straight into the framed beds that are going to line the sunken garden, I’ve had to pot each and every one of them.  So…twelve bags of compost and 4 bags of peat later, I think I’ve finished! (I must admit though, I had the help of Trystan who comes to do a few hours gardening every week).

I didn’t have enough pots that would accommodate the Buxus, so I resorted going to places like Home Bargains and B&M Bargains to buy plastic pots that I can eventually use in the beds around the garden.  My plan is to dig some of these in, and line the holes for the pots with gravel so that I can swap them around each season.  Helen Dillon does this in her famous garden in Ireland.  I only discovered this a few weeks ago though, because it’s a plan I’ve had for a long time.  Seemingly Helen Dillon has come under a lot of criticism for this practice, and that has made me want to do it even more.  I’m not one to be confined by ‘fickle rules’ of this nature!

I bought the Buxus plants from dutchbulbs.co.uk.  They are extremely healthy and quite large (at least 30cm high), and because I was buying a quantity of more than 25, they ended up being only £1 each plus VAT.

Both of my near neighbours have also become a bit obsessed with Buxus and they too have plans to create more formal areas of their gardens with box hedging.  All we seem to have talked about over the last week is our Box Hedging.  It must be an age thing!

Plants are growing nicely in the plastic greenhouses.  Well… apart from the Lavender that is.  I had about 12 Lavender Hidcote free with an order, and I think I’ve managed to kill most of them.  They have now been transported to the ‘Emergency Ward’, ie my neighbour’s conservatory, and she is giving them 24-hour care to see if they can be revived.  It seems that I had kept them too wet – they were placed at the outer edge of the plastic greenhouse and they had been subjected to quite a bit of slanted rainfall.  The soil was soaking and this may have rotted the roots.  I know for next time to make sure the soil is more gritty with better drainage and to keep them dry.  I’ve grown Lavender successfully in the garden, but that is the Munstead variety and I don’t know whether it’s a bit more hardy than Hidcote.

As well as Jiri not being around, the weather has been atrocious with the exception of one sunny day.  Hopefully, next week I’ll have some progress to report.

For the want of structure

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.

No, the Romans aren’t coming

I saw a photo in a magazine in France, depicting a beautiful pergola with stone columns, a fireplace, a chandelier, climbing plants and a fireplace at the far end.  I wanted to copy elements of it, but in a cost effective way, and in a way that fits the site.

I purchased 6 12″ diameter telegraph poles at £10 each – bargain!  Then, I asked my dad if he could turn tops for them to look like the circular tops of columns.  My plan was to paint the columns with a stone effect paint.  I spent ages looking for the paint and settled on Stonelux.  It was a bit expensive at just under £100 for a tin big enough to paint all the columns.  When it arrived, I painted the columns and I didn’t like the colour – even though I had ordered a lime colour it was still too yellow.  So I mixed some light Weathershield Magnolia with a tester pot of Weathershield black to create more of a grey colour and popped that into the Stonelux.  The result was a lot better.  What I realised then is that I could have made this stone effect paint myself, by just mixing those two products with some sand.  That’s what I’ll do when it needs another coat, because it will save quite a bit of money.

We used 6×1 tanalised wood for the top, and since the photograph below, I’ve painted them a dark oak colour. They’re going to take quite a bashing with the weather, so they’re probably going to need to be repainted quite often.

I found a large chandelier at the wholesalers – a metal one that won’t rot and I can touch it up with paint effects when it gets weathered.  And I had a metal scroll plaque that I’d bought in Homesense years ago, that I thought would fit on the entrance to the pergola.

The result is a bit of a monstrosity at the moment.  You can really see it from the road because it’s so high up and visible, and neighbours keep referring to it as ‘the Roman columns’.

I’m hoping that the planting will calm it down over the next 3 years.  I’ve planted various climbers to wind their way around the pergola.  These include:

Boston Ivy

Clematis (see pic)

Purple Wisteria

Honeysuckle

I also grew a lot of Dahlia’s in the bed you can see behind the table in the photograph above.  This was the first time I’d ever grown Dahlia’s, and I had them as a free gift with an order from J.Parker’s Plant Wholesale.  They were a bit of a triumph!  So I’m going to grow a lot more this year.  But I didn’t like digging them up at the end of the season and cleaning them all, and the more I have, the more time-consuming that will be.  I’d like to find a way of keeping them in the ground but protecting them, if possible.

 

The folly project

I’ve held a fascination for follies for as long as I can remember.  They’re romantic, ridiculous, surprising and majestic, all rolled into one.  I wanted to create one that was visible from the kitchen – a building with no purpose whatsoever, but offered an interesting feature in the garden.

There is stone everywhere on this site, so I thought that this time, I’d build something from old red bricks.  I checked Gumtree and there was a person who wanted to get rid of a pile of unused but antique looking red bricks in Ruthin, 800 for £50.  It was a bit of a problem finding someone to collect them for me, but eventually I got them delivered, and they were as worn-looking and slightly mossy as I’d hoped.

I started looking for salvaged arched church windows to complete the folly, but most of them I found were too big, too expensive or made from wood.  Eventually I opted for reproductions from Chapter House Design – you can see their range here:

http://www.chapterhousedesign.co.uk/

The folly we’ve ended up with is only about 9ft x 5ft, and I’ve planted Boston Ivy on the one side to start the process of covering some of the brick.

We had to use some blocks because we didn’t have enough bricks.  However, these have now been lime-plastered and they’re going to have pieces of trellis over them this year, to help the plants climb and to cover the blocks.

I found some lanterns in the attic that I had bought about 15 years ago and never used.  They’ve now been erected either-side of the doorway.

I’d like to have another go at a folly, somewhere else in the garden, where I have more space and this time, I’ll buy antique-looking bricks from the builder’s merchant to ensure I have enough.  I’d also love one of the gothic looking doorways from Chapter House, and the chance to use one of those somewhere would be fantastic.

If you have a folly in your garden, I’d love to see the photos, please share!