March, 2017: Discovering what's here

March, 2017

Cowslips (or primula)

Okay okay okay! March is here and it's brought the bulbs out, reminding me why the garden of this house was so appealing!

In between showers, today has seen me attacking some edging. The grass really has taken over the concrete in the back garden so armed with little hand held shears I have been taking off the overgrown edges of the main path through the garden. As it has been wet, the earth/grass was very easy to pull up, if a little wet. About two metres were exposed before the rain came down and made it miserable.

Hand cutting the edges of the grass

Boxed bedding ... on my wishlist!

Clearing broken borders...

Ornamental quince

A visit to Lidl got me an edging tool for under a fiver which has meant we have more path, less hairy grass. But it exercised some upper body muscles I hadn't used in a while and made me think I'd done something drastic to my shoulder/neck but I've slept it off and repeating the same job further round the grass made me realise the cause of the pain...

Crocuses that lasted a week...

Pansies added to an empty-looking pot.

A long border with crumbling border cleared of old growth.

Blue perennials came up beside the daffs.

It's made me realise that as well as taming the overgrown grass and hedges surrounding the grass, there may well be other structures or paths underneath the grass. It is very mossy and overgrown and could well be hiding other things I could use to define the garden. I would love to have a plan drawn up to ideally start to make it our own, but I am also going to have to be smart about doing things cheaply.

Planning...

Man shed behind the daffs!

Each time I go out into the garden I discover new things and come across budding plants that were planted last year. Which is also why I need to start logging what goes where, and start to follow Beth Chatto's motto of growing plants in the conditions they thrive.

My youngest wants us to put in a dustbin lid pond with some stones around the edge so I have to nominate the best position for that soon or she'll stop helping mummy...

But it's also made me rethink our shed arrangements as I discovered they bag I had been storing all my gloves in, in the tiny shed I was using as a store for all our gardening materials and tools, has succumbed to the leaks (I think a stalactite had formed) and I have nearly lost all our family of gardening gloves...

A new home office with a garden shed is on my wish list but it will also be a future plan ( i.e. not this year!) and may mean some rejigging of the current herb garden... we didn't move here thinking it was a short term answer so here's to plans and dreams!

P.S. The recent storms which brought down trees a block away, crushing a car, made us very glad we took down the rotten horse chestnut when we moved in.

March 19th

Another day in the garden made me realise how much needs doing in March and how much of my gardening in this house involves ripping out things that have been allowed to take over and my plans will have to take as long as they take.

Another session on the long border down one side of the garden has uncovered broken down walls, walls which are built out of random bits of concrete and lots of cowslips that grow through the grass. Roses that are randomly pruned and appear to be standards are growing wild and despite my initial post saying that I liked the garden because of the plants I grew up with, a rethink of its layout and contents will probably mean a few roses get pruned...

I also need to be clever because I am the going to be able to rebuild a garden without funds and equipment. I am watching Monty Don's tv programme to get a few ideas. Hard graft and creativity do seem to be the answer when budgets are low.

A visit to a local independent nursery yesterday got a few plants (pansies, a penstemon and another pretty pink flower) which have gone into the pots I have around the garden, another thing that was left behind by the previous owner. The daffodils are out in profusion like they were when we viewed the house and some of the clearings we did last year has caused them to be brighter this year. I will try and jump on any dandelions that missed the cull too.

The tree we had chopped down did fall on the compost bin, breaking the concrete that it was made with so that needs reinstating at some point. These jobs make the little ones of replanting pots with flowers feel like I am only scratching the surface. However, a garden is, despite the impression we get from garden makeover programmes, a changing organism that takes on the identity of its gardener, not the other way about.

February, 2017

I started writing about my garden with great enthusiasm and good intentions... then the end of January turned into tax return frenzy! Its now foggy freezing February and the last thing I want to do is work outside in the cold. Time for planning then, or finding the plan I drew up of the existing plot and making a sketch of what I'd like to change...

sketch plan of the garden and house

When we moved, I had all good intentions of properly organising the house and not ending up with piles of 'stuff' again. Filing? Well, that leopard hasn't changed its spots...
We have been getting plans drawn up for an extension so that part of the garden will in fact disappear, but it wasn't an area I've been digging – it's another concrete corner of the garden!
I have had a lingering cold, which isn't helping, and I've found a sketch (not the one I was looking for) which shows the garden as it was when we moved in (prior to the chestnut being felled!)

The garden is a similar length to the one we had in our last house but it's three times the width.
That means we have quite a lot of ideas, but equally means we have discarded a few.
I had an allotment in St Albans and it was one that the previous gardener had planted an amazing strawberry plot. I'd love to recreate that. Ideally, I've been thinking about having some raised beds so that I can grow some vegetables. The things that grew well in the allotment were strawberries, artichokes and squash. It'll be interesting to see what grows well here...

The house I grew up in

We laughed at having four sheds but they are in various states of decrepitude and don't really have enough space to store much inside. We have put a replacement shed/home office on our wish list, but it will be some way off, and in a perverse logic, it will likely be occupying the herb garden.
Most gardeners will say that a garden takes as many years to design as you live in a house – my last house's garden also changed widely over 14 years, and it was only when I went home to  my parents' in Scotland, that I realised I'd planted some of the same plants into the garden as I'd grown up with. Maybe this is my plan for the next fourteen years. If my gardening will help my MS stay relatively stable by keeping me calm and meditative, its a winner in my book.

When we found the gnome he was pale and uninteresting!

January 2017: Winter gardens and pruning

January, 2017

We bought a bungalow in 2015  which we believed had been empty for a few years. The previous owners had obviously loved the garden and there were lots of things we loved about it too: plants I had grown up with in Scotland (peace and peony roses), trees which shaded the garden and offered potential for future use of the trees, and first and foremost it was three times the size of the garden we were moving from.

herb garden

two of the pollarded trees

Eighteen months in and occasionally I sometimes wonder if we bit off more than we can chew and we have had some unexpected calamities which were due to the neglect/lack of infrastructure brought on by an absent owner. Don't get me wrong, I am not afraid of hard work but sometimes actions that seem to make perfect sense when they are discussed, even sketched on paper, have unexpected repercussions; unexpected tree roots or disease can make those plans disappear in an instant.

One of the three neglected trees at the bottom of the garden – a horse chestnut – was rotten throughout but we only discovered that after bringing in tree surgeons to pollard the trees. The immediate response: 'we'd advise you to take this one down: I wouldn't like to see it fall on your kiddies' was all it took to have an enormous trunk falling (in a managed way, with ropes) onto the sheds and concrete compost bin and smashing their way to the ground! We still have the chunks we thought we could burn in our woodburner (not a chance!) rotting into insect homes behind a shed...

watering herbs in January?

Chainsaw action!

We also have a robin who takes an interest in our summer barbecues and joins us on the picnic table. He joined us today (mid January) when the chainsaw was cutting into the two prickly hawthorns beside the herb garden. Agitated he was and then Dan discovered nesting sites in the hawthorn. I tried to get a pic of the robin today but he is definitely camera shy.

I do have great plans for the garden and have half an eye on designing it for an unknown future: we have young children now (who were keen to water the herbs today despite the showers earlier) and I don't want my future garden to just work for my worst case scenario, it needs to work for teenagers and family visitors too. We went round c.14 gardens during Open Gardens week in Letchworth last year and saw many ideas for our garden but we have to make the budget, orientation and plants work for us. We inherited four sheds when we moved in which are in varying states of decrepitude and we'd like to dismantle and rearrange modern sheds but again that all takes time, planning and finances. It also requires scheduling visits to garden centres and shed assemblers in such a way that small children are amused or at school!

I sense that we have taken on a serious project, which one year in already involves losing the herb garden we installed last year. I hope to show work in progress and future plans as time goes on.