The Garden In Winter

Here's a photo of the garden looking very Christmas-y a couple of weeks ago, when we were snowed in - R couldn't get the car out of the drive. I think it's the first time since we moved here that snow has settled, and it was quite deep - at least for the south of England!



Best wishes for Christmas to anyone reading this: I'm sorry I don't feel able to do my usual round of visiting other blogs and wishing people a happy Christmas this year, for reasons I've explained here.

I hope to have a bit more time to do some blogging - and some gardening - in 2018.

The Bees In The Hedge

Yesterday a swarm of honeybees flew over our front garden - for an hour or so the air above the garden was thick with thousands of bees, and I had to close all the windows at the front to stop them flying in.



They settled in our front hedge, massed together in a cone which looked the size of a large watermelon. We didn't know they were there until our neighbour came round to tell us about it, as the settled swarm was only visible from their side.



I hastily looked up local collectors on the British Beekeeepers Association website, R rang the nearest one, and a helpful beekeeper came round to remove the swarm for us. This involved attracting the bees to a syrup solution on a frame, a hundred or so at a time, so they could be shaken into a box. It was quite a long process, especially as the cone of bees we could see turned out to be the tip of the iceberg, and there were a lot more than we'd first thought. The beekeeper said he should have brought a bigger box!



He did manage to get nearly all of them in the end though, and once the queen was in the box, the other bees were more willing to follow her there. It was a fascinating half-hour or so, and the beekeeper didn't even charge us for removing the bees, though we'd happily have paid just for the experience of watching him at work.

#MyGardenRightNow

We have been taking part in the wildflower charity Plantlife's campaign Say No To The Mow, and leaving an area of our lawn unmown this year, to see what comes up.



Mostly we have different grasses, but there are some little wildflowers dotted around too.

At the far end of the garden there's an area which, when we moved in, was covered with rotting elderly carpet which was failing to keep down weeds. We had the carpet and weeds removed, and temporarily sowed annuals in the space. The first year we sowed mostly Phacelia, to break up the clay soil a bit, and the second year we put in a mixture. Since then we haven't had to sow anything at all because the Nigella have so successfully re-seeded themselves they have colonised the whole space.



Eventually we hope to make this area part of a meadow with fruit trees, so we will have to dig it out again (especially as several of the weeds have returned and are spreading through the Nigella) but for now we are enjoying the flowers.

Thanks to VP at Veg Plotting for hosting this MyGardenRightNow event for the Chelsea Fringe - do visit her blog to see more people (or their feet!) in their gardens right now.

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.

Wordless Wednesday - Honesty

Blogging With ME, Big Scary Birthdays, Brief Gardening Snippets, And Black-Headed Birds

Primula denticulata alba

It was a shock to realise the other day that I haven't posted here for nearly four months. In fact, looking back, my previous couple of posts weren't about my garden at all: my last gardening post was around eight months ago.

This is partly due to my usual brain fog, and partly to my not having been able to do very much gardening lately. The latter was not so much because of the physical limitations of ME or the relentlessly wet weather, though neither have helped, but because we need to find a gardener to do some major clearance for us before we can do much more ourselves. And finding a gardener, when you have severe brain fog and need an unscented non-smoker who's willing to do the work in several short afternoon installments, completely organically, is not the easiest of tasks.

I also found garden blogging difficult last year. I made too much effort to keep up with a couple of regular memes, at the expense of having time and energy to blog about anything else. I won't make that mistake again. It was interesting to follow the memes for a while, but I couldn't manage to do it all the time, and I shouldn't have done it for as long as I did. It's meant I haven't finished (in fact I've barely started) posting my tour round my new garden, and I haven't blogged at all about the things we have managed to do here so far. Unfortunately blogging with ME, like gardening with ME, is an ongoing series of choices: you simply cannot do all of the things you want to do.


Assorted Narcissus

At the moment I'm also very conscious of my approaching birthday: I will be 50 tomorrow. I don't usually pay much attention to birthdays with zeros on the end, but this one is making me feel a bit daunted. When we moved here I was 47, and I had hoped that by now we'd have got a lot more done, both to the garden and to the house. But for various reasons last year was not a good year for me, everything seemed to move at a snail's pace, and I ended up feeling quite dispirited.

So what have we managed to get done over the last eight months? In no particular order, here are a few snippets:

* R dug up clumps of Achillea, Eryngium, Lillium, Narcissus, and Galanthus and I put them into pots to keep them safe out of the way of the coming clearance.


Eryngium seedheads

* We had a much-needed week's holiday on Exmoor in the autumn, staying in a cottage on an organic farm.  It was the highlight of our year:  the sun shone every day and we were able to visit gardens and go for walks on moorland, through woodland, and along the beach.

* I washed out a couple of dozen pots and three bird baths.

* I bought a pot of pansies, curry plant, and ivy from a garden centre sale, reduced from £20 to £2. I don't normally impluse buy, or buy ready-planted pots, but this was worth it just for the pot, and the pansies brightened our winter.


Assorted pansies

* I acquired some "free" (pay postage) Agapanthus (3 white and 3 blue) and Lavenders (a mix of purple, blue, and white).

* R dug out huge quantities of Japanese anemone roots from the corner bed which is eventually going to be my herb bed.

* I consulted with gardening friends about which shrubs would make a good mixed evergreen hedge for the bare side of our garden, and made a list, and we started going round garden centres looking at some of these shrubs (and also looking for them online).

* We bought an Ilex crenata shiro-fukurin which will eventually be part of the hedge, and I put it into a bigger pot for now.


Ilex crenata shiro-fukurin foliage

* We put a tarpaulin over the shed roof, secured with ropes, to keep the rain out. It's an old shed which we'll eventually replace, so we just wanted a temporary solution to the leaking roof.

* R cut back the Solanum which collapsed all over the lawn during a storm, bringing a large section of trellis with it.

* We bought a baby Amelanchier - it's 3' tall so it's going to take several years to get as big as the mature one in our previous garden, but it cost all of £4.99 so we think it was a bargain!


Amelanchier blossom in our previous garden

* We measured the whole garden in detail, so that I can do a proper design instead of relying on my original quick sketch plan.

* We visited an organic fruit tree nursery to ask for information and advice about growing fruit trees, and made a list of possibilities.

* I was given an Aloe Vera, much to my delight - I was intending to buy one! I've never had a houseplant before so this is a new departure for me, but I use a lot of aloe vera gel so I think it will be very useful.

* I weeded all my pots, and repotted a few things which were looking cramped or low in compost.


Anemone blanda

* I planted tomato, basil, parsley, and bean seeds.

* R made a start on digging out the front lawn, which is thin, weedy, and awkward to mow. In the long term we're going to remove the whole of the front garden and start again, but he was keen to get rid of the lawn sooner rather than later, so he is digging it out and I'm going to plant annual wildflower seeds there for the time being. Suggestions please, for what we can do with the turf - he's already filled a dustbin to rot down to make compost, and we don't have any other spare containers.

We also kept the bird feeders topped up, and did quite a lot of watching birds in the garden over the last few months. As well as all the usual suspects, this year we've been pleased to see some new visitors. We have a pair of blackcaps which are here most days now, we've also seen siskins a few times, and we've had one visit from another black-headed bird which was either a marsh tit or a willow tit (apparently it's very difficult to tell the difference, and baffles even experienced birders, which we certainly are not).


Black-headed birds

Now we are making plans for our other garden visitors, in the form of insect houses and bee tubes, among other things, but we need to wait until we've found a gardener and had the clearance done before we can put them up.

And at the moment, to deal with my feelings about turning 50 and struggling with the very long and daunting list of necessary tasks which we haven't yet done, I'm making a different sort of list - one of 50 things to do while I'm 50. On it are small things which I will enjoy doing and which I think I have a good chance of being able to do, such as visit a special garden, eat a summer pudding, walk round a wildflower meadow, and enlarge a favourite photo to put on the wall. That way, even if we continue to be unable to get the bigger things done, at least I can make this more of a "feel-good" year.

It's not on my list, because I don't know if I will be able to do it, but I will certainly try to keep this blog updated a bit more often over the coming months, and to get back to that garden tour I'd intended to finish posting by now ... .

Edit 18/05/16: It's crazy, given how much I struggle to blog at all, but I've started a 50 Things To Do While I Am 50 blog, so I can record all the things I manage to do. Click the title if you'd like to know what I've done so far.