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.