Garden Tour - The (Ex) Pergola

I've been neglecting this blog this year. This is partly because I've been focusing on my 50 Things To Do While I'm 50 blog instead - after all, I'm only going to be 50 for one year, and the garden will still be here next year. But it's also partly because I've been feeling a bit dispirited about the garden, as we still haven't managed to find a gardener to help us with the rest of the clearance, which is too much for us to do on our own, so we still haven't been able to start planting the things we want here.



We have managed to do one big thing to the garden this year though, so I'm using that for the next bit of my garden tour. When we moved in there was a large pergola on the right hand side of the house, attached to our fence. In the spring and summer it looked quite good, as it was covered with climbers (though rather too many of them were pink for our taste). At the far end of it, away from the house, was a huge Campsis, which looked glorious when in flower.





The tangle of climbers over the top of the pergola was also popular with wildlife and was always full of birds.



However, the pergola was in a very inconvenient place, blocking the side passage from the front garden. This meant that if we wanted to, for instance, take a wheelbarrow full of compost from the car at the front of the house to the shed at the bottom of the back garden, we had to wheel it through the side passage, unload all the compost, turn the wheelbarrow on its end and carry it sideways through the posts of the pergola, and then reload it with the compost before wheeling it up the garden.



And in the autumn and winter, the structure didn't look so good. We could see that the plants growing over it had been neglected for some time and weren't properly trained, and as most of them were deciduous the pergola ended up looking bare in places and tatty overall.



And when the climbers covering the fence died back, we could also see that some of the wood of the pergola was rotting, and the fence was in dire need of repair or replacement. It wasn't clear whether the fence was holding up the pergola or the pergola was holding up the fence, but the pergola leaned precariously towards the house, and on windy days the whole structure swayed drunkenly towards our neighbours' garden and then back into ours.



We would have liked to have saved some of the climbers, just for the sake of the wildlife, but after some consideration we decided that it would be easier to remove the whole lot, put in a new fence (without a pergola so we can get through the side passage), and then start again, planting fast-growing shrubs to provide shelter for the birds and insects. We spent most of this autumn clearing the plants away. As the climbers started to come down we could really see just how wonky the pergola was.



Climbers going ...



Going ...



At this point we found one (abandoned old) birds' nest. Can you spot it?



It was right up against the fence, only about three feet from the ground.



Nearly gone ...





Gone ...



Work in progress on the new fence. I went to stay with my parents while it was being put up because I wouldn't have been able to cope with the noise, so these photos were taken by R on his phone. Our nice neighbours (whose garden you can see) left their side gate open so the work could be done on both sides.



Many thanks to Ian from Pinewood Fencing, who we think did a great job, at a reasonable price. The new fence is guaranteed for 25 years. It looks extremely bare now - and the patio suddenly looks huge! - but I'm planning to get some pots of bamboo to put alongside the fence for the time being and later on we will put some more plants in the ground there.