Garden Tour - An Introduction

February - Galanthus

When we moved here, back in January, I originally hoped I'd be able to get this blog started within the first month or so. I'd planned to join in Helen's end of month view meme, giving me a record of the first year in the garden, and anyone reading an introduction to it. Events conspired against me, however. First we had three weeks without internet, which - when put together with the preceeding two or three months when I'd ignored everything not to do with the move - left me with about two thousand unread emails in my inbox and a thousand unread blog posts on my akregator.


March - Iris

Then R had two minor accidents during the first few weeks we were here, which meant we both ended up with a lot of extra paperwork, R couldn't use his hand for a couple of weeks (he's fine now), and we were without a car for about a month. The list of jobs we needed to do got longer and longer, we spent several months struggling to get through the most urgent ones, and any thought of blogging (or indeed gardening) went out of the window.


April - Centaurea

I did, however, manage to get out into the garden once or twice a month in order to take photos, so that at least I have some sort of record of what's here. I had intended to leave everything for the first year in any case, so that I didn't accidentally dig up anything we were going to want to keep. In the event I wouldn't have had time to do much in the way of digging anyway!


April - Aquilegia

So I thought instead of a year's end of month views, I would do a series of posts concentrating on each section of the garden in turn, to provide a tour of it for anyone reading, and give me the pictorial reminder I wanted of which plants are in which places.


May - Papaver Orientale, possibly Beauty Of Livermere?

The back garden seems huge to us - it's four times the size of our old one - and it's already well-established, which has some advantages, but also a lot of disadvantages, as much of it isn't really to our taste. Structurally it's quite an old-fashioned garden, with a big patio behind the house, then a large lawn with two long straight borders on either side of it, and at the far end of the lawn a bed on either side with two huge conifers between them. A path leads between the conifers to a further space which obviously used to be a kitchen garden but which when we moved in had clearly been neglected for some time. Part of this space is gravelled over, and all of it is over-run with weeds. There is also a shed and a very dilapidated and grubby looking greenhouse.


May - Rhubarb

As far as the planting is concerned, there seems to have been very little in the way of planning - the previous owners clearly just bought plants they liked whenever they saw them and plonked them down wherever they could find a space, without considering whether plant and space were compatible.


June - Campanula

Although there are some plants we love and will definitely keep, there are a lot more we dislike intensely. Anyone who knows me well will know that I loathe the colour pink - unfortunately it seems to have been the previous owners' favourite colour. There is a profusion of pink-flowered plants throughout the garden, often planted in combination with yellow-flowered ones, a mixture which just seems wrong to me.


June - Lillium

So before we can do our own thing with the garden, we will first have to undo a lot of the things we dislike about it. In some ways a blank canvas would have been much easier, though we are pleased to have some established trees and a lot of cover for wildlife.


July - Achillea Ptarmica The Pearl

We are also pleased with all the plants in this post, which will definitely be staying - a good argument for the "leave everything for a year" rule, as we'd never have known they were there if we'd dug everything out in January. I recognised most of them (I had to have some help with the Achillea - thanks to Peonymad for the ID), but I don't know all the individual varieties, so if you can identify any of these for me, I'll be very grateful - please do leave a comment.


July - Leucanthemum

I'll follow this post up, whenever I have time, by posting photos through the year of each area of the back garden. You may have noticed that I haven't mentioned the front garden. That needs even more work than the back, and I'm going to need a lot of inspiration to work out what to do with it. If all goes well I'm hoping to make it the subject of next year's end of month view.