Creating my own garden

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I bought my cottage in a semi derelict state in early 2000. The “garden” was an overgrown meadow with almost no plants other than a beautiful old apple tree and the “lawn” was a mix of meadow and nettles.

I was very busy fitting a new kitchen and bathroom and redecorating the house but I did find time in the early spring to create some simple curved borders (The garden is basically a triangle which creates all sorts of odd angles so I made the lawn an eliptical shape) and this allowed for a nice mix of wide and shallow borders. and mowed the meadow.nettles.

I’ve never used weed killers on what became the lawn and today it is nice and green and full of clover which I love because it attracts nectar loving insects such as bees,hoverflies and butterflies.

A few weeks later there is some sign( but not much!) of improvement.

In the first few weeks I planted about eight 2-3 foot high conifers I bought cheaply from the local auction to give the garden some structure. I then planted perhaps 50 perennial plants and later on some flowering cherries and buddleia and a few other shrubs

.I also erected a fence to block the view of what was a builders storage area.( thankfully he has now sold up and the next door field is now used to keep horses) The fence was my first ever attempt at fencing and I made the mistake of not cementing in the fence posts so after the first strong wind they all moved! I had to redo the whole thing but learned a valuable lesson !

About 4 years later the garden had matured to this.

All the above photos are taken from almost exactly the same stand point

The garden takes less than 20 minutes a week maintenance during the growing season including cutting the lawn and trimming the edges which is roughly 35 feet wide( + about 6 hours work spread evenly between early spring and late autumn)

The garden was designed with wildlife in mind and attracts, hedgehogs, birds, foxes, bats, and a wide range of insects. Starlings nest in the old overhanging apple tree and the hazel nut tree (just off shot) attracts mice which store the hazel nuts in any empty plug trays in my coldframes. I have also had visits from green and speckled woodpeckers.

Here are some before and after shots of the other side of the same garden.

The white extension on the back of my cottage was bleak and uninspiring so I planted climbers , shrubs and perennials around it to soften the lines.

The garden includes a wide range of very commonly available perennial mainly evergreen plants most of which I grow on my plant nursery.

These include ornamental grasses,rudbeckia,hardy fuchsias,campanula (carpetting and taller versions) dianthus,perennial geraniums,lysimachia,heuchera,golden marjaram,ajuga,crocosmia,winter flowering heathers,osteospermum and I add about a dozen annual pelargoniums and a few cosmos grown from seed.

The garden is at its best in the growing season but because it is stocked with mainly evergreen plants there’s interest all year round and heathers ,a few hellebores and primula /polyanthus bulbs provide winter and early spring colour. There are daffodils and other spring flowering bulbs planted under the apple tree.

A trick I learned by accident is to plant daffodils under perennial geraniums.

The daffodils grow quickly in spring and push their flower stems through the evergreen foliage of the geraniums and then just as the daffodil flowers fade the geraniums put on a spurt of growth which covers up most of the daffodil leaves so cutting these down is not required.

Perennial geraniums are the low maintenance gardeners friend. They are evergreen come in white,red pink or blue and other than a haircut after flowering or in mid September they’ll provide evergreen weed supressing/wildlife encouraging cover all year round and flower for months

IOn response to a question about only spending 20 minutes a week on the garden I’ve added my reply below:-

Yes in the growing season I genuinely never do more than 20 minutes a week on the garden and 10 minutes of that is cutting the grass. Most weeks I don’t do anything. There is virtually no soil to be seen so weeds don’t grow very much. I do about 5 hours out of season though to trim everything back and get it ready for next year.

It is a work in progress and every year I change things. Initially it was all a bit too green (particularly in autumn) but over the past couple of years I’ve added far more autumn flowering perennials and the colour is much better now. I love the perennial geraniums but they’ve gone a bit rampant this year so I shall be reducing each plant by 75% in the early spring.

If I had my time again I wouldn’t have planted as many conifers . Instead I would have made more use of evergreen flowering shrubs which are more interesting and take trimming better. We all learn though and this garden was one of the very first I designed.

10 Sep, 2010
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Cinderella

What a transformation. It must be a lovely feeling to see what you have done,and what it was like before you started. I love what you have done to the extension.

10 Sep, 2010

Creating my own garden

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