I'm going to start my tour with this raised bed at the house end of our garden (behind the acer in the photo above), mainly because it is one of the few parts of the garden which had much done to it in 2014. It has a curved section in the corner behind our downstairs bedroom ...
... one side of which leads into a straight section which runs along the back of our office/dining room.
We knew at once we would have to start work here because the bed is higher than it should be - it covers part of the damp course - and has no drainage. The drainpipe you can see in some of the photos going down into the bed has no corresponding drain coming out of the bed. We were concerned that this might lead to damp in the back walls of the house.
We asked a builder for advice, and he suggested that we first remove the foliage growing up the wall of the house, and then dig a trench all along the back of the bed where it adjoins the house, and fill it with gravel, to create a very basic French Drain. However, in order to be able to do this we first had to clear the bed as it was very overgrown with a mixture of weeds and cultivated plants which had gone wild and were all tangled up together.
I wouldn't have been well enough to clear the bed in a hurry, and R wouldn't have had time, so we had to employ some gardeners to dig the plants out.
In the long-term we plan to make the garden a lot less formal and plant for wildlife, so it was ironic that the first thing we did here was to have this work done, as the overgrown bed was obviously a haven for frogs and insects. It was quite upsetting to have to have the plants all ripped out, but we didn't want to take any chances with damp.
We did dig up a few of the nicest plants and put them in pots - a large lavender, a pink daisy which I gave to my Mum, a purple allium (which looks rather more pink in this photo than it is in reality) ...
... and a blue and white aquilegia, for instance. We asked the gardeners to leave the purple clematis which was growing up the fence, and any snowdrop bulbs they came across.
They also left quite a lot of roots of other plants, unfortunately, so we have had to keep digging these out through the year: the Japenese Anemones are a particular nuisance and there seem to be an awful lot of them (not just in this bed, but all round the garden - I like them but don't like the way they spread so will keep a few in pots!).
We didn't get anything done about the very sad-looking fence as it's our neighbour's boundary, but we discovered later that this section of fence is ours, so we will try to get it replaced - or at least fixed - soon.
We haven't had time to do the gravel trench at the back of the bed yet, and we're not sure what we're going to do with the rest of it. R is inclined to remove the whole bed so we don't have to do the trench at all, but I am wondering whether we could turn it into a herb bed if we could improve the drainage sufficiently. We have a huge amount of gravel elsewhere in the garden which we will have to move, so we might as well move it there!
In the meanwhile, we put some canes into the middle of the curved section of the bed with the intention of growing beans, but unfortunately failed to do so last year (we planted them and then went on holiday, so it wasn't the best of timing, and we're not sure whether they got too wet, too dry, or too slugged!). We will try again this year, but will start the beans off in pots first.
We kept the straight section clear (or as clear as we could given the weeds!) ready to put in the gravel trench, but we also planted some Calendula, Nasturtiums, and Tagetes in the curved section of the bed to give us a bit of short-term colour and the wildlife something to replace the flowers they'd lost.
These did very well and kept going well into November.
After that, as I still had a lot of those bulbs to find homes for, I put some of them into baskets and stuck them into the front of the bed. They look a bit silly, but it is just a temporary arrangement - I will move them as soon as I have space for them elsewhere in the garden.
We were pleased to find that the gardeners did indeed leave the snowdrop bulbs as a clump came up in the middle of the canes in January! There are quite a lot of other bulbs too. I will dig up as many of them as I can, and put them into pots so that we can keep them.
We will keep working on this bed in 2015. I think I might add it to my end of month view posts, as it's likely to change faster than the front garden, and might be rather more interesting.
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