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.

Garden Tour - The Long Left-Hand Border

After a long delay, I am continuing my garden tour with the long border which runs down most of the left-hand side of our garden. You can see where it is in relation to the corner bed in the photo above - the edge of the corner bed is on the far left of the photo, towards the top.



At first, or from a distance, the long border looks quite good. There are a number of established shrubs ...



... and a fair amount of colour, especially in the summer ...



... including the lovely Achillea in the photo above.



Unfortunately a lot of the colour is pink though, and as you will know if you know me at all well, I loathe pink.



In particular there are several shrubs which are a pale, sickly shade of pink, like the Weigela and Deutzia in the photo above, and a really horrible sprawling Tamarisk, which has got to be my new least favourite plant.



The border is also very badly overgrown and full of weeds, which are tangled up with the garden plants so that it's impossible to dig out the one without the other.



Most of the plants in it are quite short and our neighbour has no fence, so that that our garden has very little privacy.



And while in the summer it doesn't look too bad ...



... and even attracts wildlife ...



... through the autumn and winter it becomes increasingly bare and messy-looking as the flowers die down and the weeds start to become more visible.



Over the last couple of years we have gradually been digging out the plants we like and putting them into pots. Now we are trying to find gardeners to dig out the rest of the bed and clear everything else away so we can plant a hedge. We want to get big evergreen shrubs for our hedge so that it gives us some privacy from the start, but it will be a mixed, flowering hedge to provide food and shelter for wildlife too. I don't know how long it will take us to get this done, but it is high on our list of priorities for the garden.

Garden Tour - Corner Bed

It's taken me a while to get started on my pictorial tour of the back garden because I've got so many photos to sort - I spent 2014 basically recording the garden by taking photos all round it at least once a month (twice over the summer when things were changing more quickly). I think I was over-compensating for the fact that I took so few "before" photos of our last garden!



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.

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.