Planning my garden

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As I wrote in my first blog, we moved into our lovely cottage in May and were allowed to do what we liked with the garden by our landlord. His exact words were: “Anything you do is likely to be an improvement”.

With that in mind we began tidying it up. Apart from the ponds with fish and waterlilies, conifers and ceder, shed, pallets with wood for the woodburner, birch tree in large pot and bits of trellis behind the Prunus ‘Okame’ at the bottom of the garden, there wasn’t much that made it very appealing. Though on closer inspection I did notice some aquilega seedlings growing along the fence on the left. What colour they will turn out to be will be a surprise when they start flowering next year.

For the next three weeks I didn’t really do much or plan much as I was looking for inspiration and needed to find out if anything else was growing there that needed saving. I did do some drawings and stand on the lawn making shapes with my hands, thinking it all through in my head.

Then one day I went out, armed with spade and fork and started digging my flower beds. Because of the way the garden was shaped I didn’t feel like putting in long, narrow borders in the garden, instead I decided that I wanted two circular beds halfway down the plot and a narrow strip that would connect the pallets with firewood to the corner of the shed.The plot dips there towards the shed door and I felt that would make a nice pathway.

The trellises would come in handy as well, apart from not wanting to spend a lot of money on the hard landscaping I wanted to recycle what was there and spend some money on the plants. The list of plants on my list of favourites and those I’d love to have is long (we’re talking about a list the length of a roll of toilet paper here, and that’s all small print).

Getting to know my soil was interesting. Apart from a layer of heavy Essex clay (I bet that will be ideal for roses), the topsoil was like being a member of the Timeteam crew! Pot tile, plate, cup shards and pieces, a victorian dress button, a few bullet casings, clay pipe, glass and about a million rusty old nails were buried amongst the other rubble, stones, flints, bricks and rooftiles. Not as daunting an exercise as it reads, it was actually fun to dig up so many odds and ends.

The first circular bed went in, it looks smaller than it actually is in this pic

the shed is now connected to the pallets with logs

• 15 Aug, 2009
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