End Of Month View - July

If you cast your mind back to my April end of month view, you may recall there was a space in the front garden, where R had removed an ash seedling and a large Weigela. There is now a scattering of Papaver rhoeas across this space ...



... which is a bit of a surprise, as I don't remember having planted any. Still, I'm not complaining! I did throw some other old seeds down there, including some yellow poppies, Dicranostigma, which are just coming into flower too.



The rest of the space has been colonised by a nearby Geranium, which R unintentionally divided when he did the work in April, but which seems to have recovered well, and by yet more Japanese Anemones - they are ubiquitous in this garden and a bit of a nuisance, but at least they are pretty.



Meanwhile in the back garden, we have a new arrival.



Yes, at last we have a new fence: a lovely change from the view of our neighbour's oil tank and bins which you can see in my May post. Now we can finally finish digging out the corner bed, fill it with gravel, and plant herbs in it. It'll probably take us a few more months to actually get this done, especially as we'll need to paint the fence first, but at least it feels as though we are getting somewhere now! At the moment I'm just doing a bit of weeding, and leaving the patches of Calendulas which have seeded themselves from the ones I planted there last year.



For more end of month views, visit The Patient Gardener.

End Of Month View - June

This is another quick post, as I'm still rushed off my feet with other things, my internet connection is playing up, and the hot weather has fried my brain.



There's also not a lot to show you as the garden hasn't changed much since the end of May. The greyish blur at the top of the above photo of the front garden ...



... is a lovely self-seeded silver Eryngium. I think I'll be digging this up to keep. The bees like it too!



The back corner bed also hasn't changed much - we still haven't managed to find someone to fix the fence - but you may notice that something has gone missing since I took the May photos (one of which is inset in the June one below).



Yes, we decided in the end to remove the wigwam so that I could plant the beans elsewhere. I'll show you where at a later date.

Finally, the orange lily which I used for my blog header is flowering again at one side of the corner bed - I was hoping it had survived the gardeners who dug out this bed last year, so I'm really pleased to find it did!



I do have a bit of a love-hate relationship with lilies, because they are so dangerous for cats (please click either link to find out more if you have cats and grow lilies), but as I don't have any cats myself I will be keeping these, making sure when I move them out of this bed that they are tucked up against a fence or wall and not somewhere visiting cats are likely to brush against them. I love orange and will be planting a lot more orange flowers as this garden hardly has any, so they are a welcome splash of colour for me.

The blue you can see in the photo behind them is a clump of Triteleia (I know, now called Brodiaea, but I just can't get on with new names for plants!), and I'm really pleased that this survived the gardeners' purge too.

For more end of month views, visit The Patient Gardener.

End Of Month View - May

I am not very happy with my garden this month. The front garden seems to be very much an early spring garden, as it is almost as colourless now as it was in winter.



The huge Choisyas are still flowering, but they are very much one-month wonders, and there are about half as many flowers on them as there were a couple of weeks ago. They have also grown to meet each other so that if we want to walk down the path between them we have to push our way through them.



There is a spot of colour provided by a Cistus which is just coming out, but like most things in our new garden, it is pink. Have I mentioned that I hate pink?!



And the corner bed in the back is looking worse than ever. The end fence panel blew right down and we had to remove it, dismantle it, and take it to the dump, so there is now a big gap, and a lovely view of our neighbour's oil tank. We've had two builders come and look at the fence, but the first took four weeks to send us a quote, and then the quote was very high and they wanted part-payment in advance, which we're not willing to do. The second emailed to say that they didn't have time to do the work after all. So we are no further on than we were last month!



I have dug up the Clematis Jackmanii which was climbing the fence and put it in a pot, and since I took the photos on Friday I've also dug up and potted two of the prettier Aquilegias from that bed and done some more weeding. However, I'm increasingly frustrated by the fact that I have beans hardening off ready to plant out around that wigwam and I daren't do it until the fence has been replaced, in case the builders damage them. They are now about 2 feet high and have nothing to climb!



We have another builder coming tomorrow, but we're not holding our breaths. Roll on the end of June.



By the way, if anyone's reading this blog and wondering what happened to the garden tour I started posting - I haven't forgotten it, I've just had too many other things to do and not enough brain-power to do them! But I do hope to continue it soon - at the moment I only seem to be showing you the bad bits of the garden, and there are a lot of good bits too.

For more end of month views, visit the Patient Gardener's blog.

End Of Month View - April

As you can see, we have started vandalising the front garden!



R has spent quite a lot of April digging big holes in it. We had originally intended to have left all the big shrubs until we can afford to have landscapers come and remove the wall and path and put in new hard landscaping ...



... however, we discovered a number of ash saplings growing very close to the house, which had to be removed, and the roots of one of them (circled in picture above) were so entangled with those of the big Weigela in the corner that R had to dig that out too.



RIP Weigela. The photo above was taken when it was in flower last May. I had intended to get rid of it at some point, as it was a yucky p*nk colour, but not until we bulldozed the garden, as it was a magnet for bees. I will have to plant more bee-friendly plants in the front as soon as I can.



As you can see, I now have a nice big space for them! I might put annuals in here for the time being, though it is a very shady spot, so I'd have to find ones which will tolerate this.



This is the front from above now, showing the location of the new space.



And this is the rest of the front garden, showing a bright splash of red ...



... in the form of a clump of tulips, which are providing a patch of much-needed colour (though I could wish the previous owners hadn't planted them quite so close to the purple Aubretia!). I will dig these out and put them in a pot to keep as soon as they have finished flowering.



I will try to save some of the Aubretia too - I have plenty to chose from as it is growing in patches all over the horrible wall.



More colour in the front garden is provided at the moment by these Centaurea.



Meanwhile, the corner bed at the back is looking very sad, though I hope you can tell that I have been doing some weeding! There are still quite a lot of annual weeds though, as well as plants the gardeners who cleared this bed missed, mostly Japanese Anemones. There's also an Aquilegia (in photo below) which I left deliberately, hoping it would be blue or purple. It isn't - it's p*nk - so I will be digging it up and disposing of it shortly!



The fence has now collapsed and is hanging across our neighbour's path, so we will definitely have to replace it. It is annoying, because it's her boundary, but apparently it is our fence, so we will have to pay for fences both sides (the one the other side is not in much better condition). We have a builder coming to look at it this afternoon, so I might just have a nice new fence to show you this time next month!

For more end of month views, visit The Patient Gardener.

End Of Month View - March

From above, my new front garden still looks pretty bare ...



... but a closer look at the borders shows they are now full of plants coming into flower.



There is a Vinca creeping its way all along two sides of the triangle. I will probably try to remove this eventually, as it's a bit too rampant, but at the moment it's keeping the ground covered and providing some much-needed colour.



There are Primulas popping up all over the place ...



... including in the lawn, which seems to have decided it's a wildflower meadow and is also spotted with the purple Viola Cornuta I showed you in my last post (as well as dandelions, thistles, and enormous amounts of moss).



Some white Hellebores have opened up to join the dark pinkish ones I featured in my last end of month view ...



... and you can finally see what the previous owners did with that horrible stone wall - they planted it with Muscari. I'm not a big fan of these and won't be sad to lose them when we get rid of the wall, but like the Vinca they are providing much-needed colour at the moment.



There are also some lilac flowers growing down the side of the wall in a couple of places - I don't recognise these, so should be grateful if anyone could provide an ID.  The flowers look a bit like Geraniums, but they are some sort of rockery plant, perhaps an Aubretia or a Phlox?



There is not very much I can do to the garden at the moment, but I have cut back all the Asters, the dead stems of which you might have noticed in my last couple of end of month view posts, and the front borders are looking a little tidier. I'm going to dig up some clumps of Asters and put them in a pot so we can keep them when the garden is finally bulldozed!



I've already dug up and potted all the Crocus and Narcissus I could find, but I missed this little clump, so will have to find another pot.



I've also dug up all the Crocus from the corner bed in the back garden, along with a few Anemone Blanda which came up and flowered between end of month views. R hoed the weeds from the straight part of the bed and dug out some more Japanese Anemones. He also removed the broken bits of fence, and I was going to say how much better that was looking ...



... but the strong winds we've had over the last couple of days have blown some more bits of it down. We'd hoped to get away with just repairing it for now, but since I took the photo below the whole thing has pretty much broken away from the post at the house end, so it looks as though we will have to replace it as soon as we can.



For more end of month views, visit the Patient Gardener's blog.

End Of Month View - February 2015

At first glance, my new front garden looks exactly the same at the end of February as it did at the end of January - stuck in a dull and colourless 1970s time warp.



If I look a bit more closely, however, it is at least no longer completely flower-less. Tucked in among the weeds there is a small clump of Galanthus in one place ...



... and some lilac Crocus in another ...



... while underneath the overpowering shrubs a hellebore is hiding.



There are also a few tiny white flowers I don't recognise - they may be weeds but at least they are brightening things up a bit.



And there's a solitary purple Crocus in the middle of that sea of gravel!



But overall it is still pretty grim. I can't think why the previous owners didn't put in more winter colour. It will take me a while to get the front garden sorted - this year I think I will just be digging up any plants I like and want to keep, and hoping that we will be able to afford to get the wall removed and path replaced next year - but adding winter colour is high on my list of the things I want to change about it.

Meanwhile, in the back garden, I have dug the clump of Galanthus out from the corner bed and put them into pots. I already had several pots of them, and have dug some out from elsewhere in the new garden too, so I now have a sea of pots of Galanthus on one side of the patio, waiting until I've redesigned the garden and know where I want to put them.



The next job is to dig out and pot up the Crocus which have come up in the corner bed since I last posted about that!



I will wait until they have finished flowering though, as some of them are growing through the side of one of the baskets of Narcissus and it would damage them to move them now.



Though I think they will be over soon as they were rained on immediately after I took the above photos (the day before I took the one below) so are now looking rather sad.  I also need to weed the corner bed again, and hopefully we will be able to make a decision soon about whether to put the trench at the back of it or remove it altogether.



And I really must do something about that fence soon too, even if it's only to remove the broken bits of it for now!

For more end of month views, visit The Patient Gardener