Home! and (what was supposed to be) a quick tour around the garden.

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I’ve been meaning to write this since I got back, but kept putting it off…

As some of you may know, I’ve been away at uni since the end of october, which has kept me at a frustrating distance from my garden, but its the easter holidays now, and I have all of april off! Anyway, I went round on friday and saturday and took a few pictures for you. I only got into gardening about this time last year, so have only really done stuff with the borders in the front garden, the rest is just how its evolved after my parents, or maybe the people before them moulded it. For most of the year the weeds run riot, but it can look particularly charming in spring…

Standing on the edge of the front lawn looking into the edge of the orchard and the woods behind it

I posted a picture that mum sent me of this part of the orchard in my last blog. The strip running above the wall is called ’Dave’s border’ after the guy who rebuilt the wall after it falling down. After this spring flush of daffs and lungwort it just goes over to weeds for the rest of the year, so I would like to eventually stick some more stuff in it.

Forcythia (thanks Terra), daffs and more longwort… this is the back of whats supposed to be a border/bed at the corner of the front garden, but its mostly lungwort and weeds at the moment, because I didn’t get that far last year. According to mum theres also ground elder in there, which I gather is another one of those evil weeds… I may be putting it off slightly.

Looking from in the orchard onto the the front garden, (excuse the flue in the foreground). The lawn is waiting to be re-seeded, except for a patch at the back. Running alongside the hedge at a right angle to each other are the borders I cleared out and (with dad’s help), extended last year. But I was in a hurry to leave for uni when I planted them up, and I didn’t really know what I was doing, so theres a lot of work to be done there :)

Looking from the top of the orchard into the back part of it. When I was younger it was more of a propper orchard; we had rasberry canes in the bottom section there, a couple more apple trees that got cut down on boxing day, the year before last, a couple of ancient gooseberry bushes and more currant bushes than we do now (they were to the right of the photo), but over time it just kindof fell into neglect. Last year I thought about turning the patch of ground into a wildflower medow, since dad has to strim the weeds down as it is, but never had the time to do all the clearing that would be necessary, and we generally have bad luck with sowing seeds direct due to birds/slugs/chickens, so the idea kindof got abandoned.

We have lots of lungwort, its grown into big patches in the front borders and in the orchard and looks lovely at this time of year :) Although the leaves can be a bit of a nuisance later. The bumblebees absolutely love it though!

Looking from the very top of the orchard onto mum’s pink garden. The primulas in the middle are these lovely magenta candelabra ones and they look gorgeous, but once they’ve flowered the patch gets taken over by bindweed. Its quite good timing actually, but mum wants to be able to plant stuff that will take over where the candelabras leave off, so there are plans to crack out the glysophate this year.

The veg patches in the top garden, where mum grows lots of lovely veg. The left hand side of the beds has been a sea of forget-me-nots these past few years, but they all got ripped up recently sob. They did kindof take over though.

This is the happy patch of clay that I got given to play with when I was little. I’d always dig in and be determined that this year I would finish weeding it, but there was this red ants nest behind the boards where that primula is on the right, and I would always upset it somehow and they would always come streaming out and I would run, shaking my arms and legs about, all the way home, like a little piggy. (I reeeaally want a pet pig!), and that would be my gardening given up for another year :P I think I can cope better with the insects now though… we certainly have enough of them!

Spike exploring another patch of mum’s garden

Primulas are my mum’s favourite flower, so we have a few of them dotted around, and at Arley this weekend she got another 5 more :)

The border in front of the kitchen window, and mum’s pink garden is the bit above the wall that runs at a right-angle to it at the back. The big beech at the back that has partially fallen down had a duck in the crown of it the other day… we are waiting to see whether it is nesting there or not.

This is another border (we seem to have no end of them! but all in disrepair :P). Dad wants to move the chicken run back and stick a path in so its easier to get a wheelbarrow into the top garden, but mum and I are hoping to keep a bit of border at the front. We are considering just stuffing it full of plants so that it is very obviously a border and dad thinks twice before paving it all over :P

Looking up from the end of that last border.

This is the side border in the front garden, and the one I started on first, since it at least partly resembled a border last year :P Its a bit shadier and damper than the back one, and I didn’t weed it as well, since it was my first, so theres still a lot to go over that crept back. I am begining to learn the awkwardness of weeding at the back of a border that has plants in (my previous experience was mainly just digging stuff out, I have yet to learn how to weed around things). When I was re-weeding the patch at the front of this (after the photo was taken), I thought I was doing really well, all balanced on two tiles in an awkward position, stretching precariously to remove a bit of nettle. I thought ‘hey, this is quite easy after all’, then I realised my knee had been lodged in a geranium for the past five minutes and I suddenly felt a lot less pleased with myself :P

This is in the middle of the border, and looks (quite impossibly), like a delphinium… does anyone know if it is? I had a couple of seedlings survive in the greenhouse, and the leaves are the same, and I remember planting out a couple of baby ones in the autumn, thinking I was sending them to their deaths…..

Back border. Also mayhem, with stuff planted too close together or too far apart of too far forward or hidden at the back (again I kindof rushed into things), but I guess its all part of the learning experience :) Almost all of it was grown by seed last year, which is why it was all stuffed in at the last minute (that, and I’d only just finished clearing the border). There are some cheeky annual weeds popping up (although i did scatter around some annual seed, so I have no idea what is what), but hopefully I’ll have that all out and shift the plants around a bit (without killing too many), before term starts at the end of the month. I really hope some of it flowers this year!

… and this is spike (again). I wanted to post him looking adorable in individual photos, but I took too many and this website is really slow (especially when our internets being dodgy!) and I think this blog is quite long enough…. sorry I went on for so long, I hope I didn’t loose you along the way! I just wanted to post some pictures before it all went crazy again, for instance…

here is where I took that other picture of the end of the chicken run border that looks up it and beyond to the kitchen one…

… and heres the orchard (please excuse the washing). That lawns been waiting for re-seeding for quite a while :P

this is that corner of the orchard with dave’s border again.

So you can see that our garden’s got some awakening to do yet ;) Admittedly it looks much prettier in spring, but I do still love the overgrown madness in summer (at least its good for the wildlife;), but I would like to have a non-overgrown space to grow some pretty flowers in :) Again, I’m sorry this is so long, I tend to waffle a bit… but I hope you enjoyed the tour :)

• 6 Apr, 2011
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