Chrisjen's Profile

I have recently retired and am now hoping to spend much more time in the garden. I live in a suburb of Sheffield and have a reasonably sized back garden which is triangular in shape. My husband has two excavated two ponds and connected them with a narrow stream. We keep fish in the top pond and the lower one is a wildlife pond. We had lots of newts last year but only the common ones.
I love Heucheras and have quite a large collection, quite a lot of them in containers as I am running out of space! I also like auriculas very much but I don't have much luck with them. I remember, when I was a child, my great uncle George keeping a large collection in a conservatory behind a little terraced house in Dorchester. He always said I could have one when when I was old enough to look after it but he died when I was still very small. I was nearly sixty before I bought my first show auricula but by that time Heucheras had claimed my heart.
I also grow hardy geraniums and I have a small rockery alongside the stream where I grow some alpines. This year I am planning to acquire a few of the more choice alpines and grow them in a tiny greenhouse beside my Lewisias.
I have been thinking of sacrificing a bit of my growing space to vegetables. Maybe some peas and runner beans. I did a few in containers last year. We had a few meals from the beans but the local pigeons got the peas when they were only inches high! I am not really interested in vegetables and my husband will only eat peas and beans so there is not a lot of point growing anything else, although I might try some soft fruit. We already have a couple of dwarf apple trees so some strawberries and raspberries might be nice.
Ornamental plants are my true love, though, and always be.