Landscaping Trials

One of the immediate puzzles of the garden was what to do with the squared-off mulched area at the foot of the lawn. (Originally the site of a greenhouse; the glass is still in the shed.)

 My first thought was that we could put a pond there. Indeed, we put down our potted pond as a trial effort and (as there were spare stones from the dry stone wall lying around) we built a small cairn around it, to create an insta-rockery feature.  It was the perfect location, nice and central, clear sunlight and a focal point when looking up the garden. A larger version would look amazing.

There turned out to be one small flaw in that plan: the site is right by the septic tank and directly in the path of the drainage field. As I don't wish to make raw sewage into a garden feature, we threw out all ideas that would involve digging.

At that point, the most obvious thing to do was to extend the lawn over the spot. I'm not wild about lawns... a well-maintained lawn is terrible for the environment (and constant work). One of my favourite things about the garden is that there isn't much lawn, so I was a little hesitant to make it bigger.

I dithered and left it for a year to see what the garden would do with the space. Predictably, the weeds took hold, predominantly toadflax which I found I rather liked. It gets very tall and looked quite striking against the background of ornamental grasses. It's a standard eco-recommendation to let a patch run wild; the centre of the garden isn't normally the suggested location, but that's what is going to happen until I run out of other garden projects.

That said, there's a pathway between the shed and the rear lawn border which connects the main garden path to the lawn / pergola. I didn't want to block that nor did I want to keep the right angle that cuts deep into the lawn, so the plan is to turn roughly half the area into lawn while the rest grows wild. 

I just had to figure out how to extend my lawn past its stone edge. To its credit, the grass was cooperating fully with seeding itself into the mulched area, but the mulch was a couple of inches below the level of the lawn while the edging stood an inch above it.

As the edging was concreted in, I borrowed a crowbar and sledgehammer from my Dad and enlisted my son's assistance. I don't typically make the children do gardening chores, because it's a quick way to kill their joy in the garden and the relaxation gardening gives me. However, I do make them join in periodically when I either need an extra pair of hands or when there's an opportunity for them to learn some practical skill.

Besides, my son was very taken with the crowbar. (So am I. Crowbars are amazing, and we're going to get one of our own.)

 

After about half an hour's solid effort we prised up four edging sections with chunks of concrete still attached. They're not made of the best stone (maybe limestone?), since two broke in half as I moved them around, but all the pieces can be reused. 

That's for another project though... my first priority was getting some turf  to go against those newly raw edges. My target for that was the other end of the lawn, up by the retaining wall onto the patio. That's the most likely site for the still-hoped-for pond (a 'next year' goal), so I figured we could sacrifice the grass there. 

Dutifully, I read up on the most basic method of turf-cutting: 

1. String twine between two stakes to mark out a straight line.
   
2. Using your spade, cut lines one spade-width apart into the turf. 
3. Still using the spade, roll up the strips of turf between the lines, and transfer to desired location.  

I gathered my dubious children and we slammed that theory into the stony wall of practice.

The grass had a tendency to stick to the retaining wall and the ground beneath it was stony at best and concrete at worst. (Perhaps this is the plumbing leading to the shed?) We found the spade too unwieldy to use, but with sulky trial and error, we figured out that our best system was to perforate each line with a handheld garden fork, then cut it with a weed knife. I ended up rolling the turf by hand, using the weed knife to cut through any sticky parts. The rolls quickly got too heavy, but I would just pull them off and start afresh.

This sort of labour was painful on my back, arms and fingers. I let the children bail once we'd cut the lines so I was rolling the turf alone, but I still got three or four strips (in 12-15 pieces) done that afternoon.

At the turf's destination, I had laid the stone edging sections into a curve, as a rough guide between what we were leaving to the weeds and where we wanted the lawn to be. Our sloppily cut turf filled about half of the area to my relief and to my daughter's withering pronouncement: "You made it worse."

Strictly speaking, the time to lay turf is in spring when the new growth will help the grass establish itself. However, there are a million (my conservative estimate) garden jobs that are best done in spring, so by necessity, some of them must be done out of season. 

As 90% of my garden maintenance is weeding and at least 50% of that is pulling grass out of every part of my garden that isn't lawn, I figured that I would only need the tiniest fraction of grass to survive in order to colonise the new ground. Even if all the turf died, I was pretty sure new grass would take it over within six months.

While I was not hugely invested in nurturing the displaced grass, I did time it right before a week of forecast rain, since the internet was emphatic about daily watering. That week turned into a very wet month, but on a dry day a week later, I cut two more strips of turf, which just about filled out the rest of the area (or close enough).

The original grass was already looking better, and the new grass came up much more easily, probably due to the rain softening the ground.

One section of the stone edging was half against the flower bed and half against the lawn. I solved that problem by cutting out an extra triangle of turf to extend the border, though it meant more crowbar work to get up the stone bricks that served as edging between border and lawn. Predictably, when I replaced them, they weren't long enough for the new line. I've popped some other stones there as a temporary measure, while I keep an eye out for something that matches the bricks. (Please interpret "temporary measure" as lasting in excess of two years.)

The relaid turf is very uneven and there's still a discrepancy between the levels of the lawn, the relaid turf and the bare ground. I'm going to let the weather, roots and worms sort that out, crossing fingers that it will be stable enough by the time we start mowing again in spring. (We need to mow already, but we're procrastinating.) 

In due course, I'll remove the loose edging sections as well, and we'll just maintain that boundary with the mower, which is already what we do with the bamboo. The pathway between lawn and the paving on the other side of the shed remains indeterminate ground cover, which I'll figure out with selective weeding.

My favourite aspect of gardening is that you do a project part of the way then let nature take its course for a bit. It goes beautifully with my brand of ADHD.

Letting nature take its course is less of an option with the patch of bare earth we'd left at the front of the lawn. As said above, the vague plan is to put in a pond next year. What are we going to do for the intervening twelve months?

To start with, we've built a temporary compost heap. We'd found a pile of bricks in the garage and another on the terrace behind the greenhouse, while an old mesh door had been discarded down the side of the garden fence. (I'm not sure what this door was used for, but it's in near-perfect condition.) We stacked the bricks loose to make the sides and propped the door up against them to create a back wall, which I pull out to turn the pile. 

 

The door falls over with every gust of wind. One might argue it's totally irrelevant, and I removed it in this week of Storms Dudley, Eunice and Franklin. Our casually laid bricks, however, have withstood the gales admirably from their sheltered position.

It's not a thing of beauty, but in the cold, wet winter months, having a compost heap right off the patio is much appreciated. I have a vague intention of moving it come spring, but I don't have a place in mind, so it's very possible we'll have rotting organic matter in the foreground of our view all summer.

Some of our old flowerpots have two year old tulip bulbs stubbornly coming back up in defiance of every gardening website I've read, so I've popped those next to the compost heap to cover the last bit of bare ground. I'm gambling that I'll remember to come back to this area before the weeds re-landscape it. (The odds are not in my favour.)

As I keep forgetting to take pictures of the early spring flowers coming up, I'll leave you with the comparison shots:

One Year Ago

 

This Week

I am absolutely cheating by taking the current picture on a sunnier day to make it look better than it is, and I am unrepentant.

 

Secret Gardening

Over the past few months, I've attempted to write a blog but never finished. The whole life thing is going backwards, and I haven't felt like chronicling my ongoing failures. Any self-respecting novelist would fast forward to the turning point of the saga, with a couple of paragraphs in which the protagonist reflects on the bleakness of the intervening years and what they've lost along the way.

Reflecting on bleakness in real time is tedious, but blogging is therapeutic for me. Fortunately, I'm not an influencer, and I don't have a brand to maintain. So now and for the foreseeable future, this is a Gardening Blog.

The garden has been the silver lining of my unemployment: a fantastically constructive diversion that lets me escape from my issues while still feeling like I'm making progress with something. It's a fully landscaped, rampantly overgrown jungle of native and exotic  plants, which I am trying to mould into something that suits us.

 

The story of my garden really begins in 2001, when the house was bought by a retiree who had travelled extensively during the course of her career and wished to recreate various garden styles she had seen overseas. Based on what lies over the neighbour's hedge, I presume the original garden was just a simple slope of grass, with perhaps a tree or two, and the inevitable paved rectangle of patio at the back door. Under the Retiree's supervision, the grassy slope became a geometric series of tiers with themed flowerbeds separated by a gridwork of paths that would make a Roman proud.

However, over the next fifteen years, the Retiree's health declined, and she was unable to tend her garden. The ornamental plants that survived expanded well beyond their designated territory while native plants doggedly reclaimed ground. 

The next owners were a young family, keen to have a go at the wilderness. They tidied up the main paths, eliminated some hazards, planted some fruit trees and defined the outdoor spaces they wanted. When they moved out, the mother thoughtfully left a letter detailing what she knew about the garden: a starting guide for the new owners. Us.

Here is the garden when we took it over, brown and dormant in midwinter.

Spoiler alert, the Family was much better at keeping everything tidy than I am.

The Retiree left a legacy of hydrangeas and roses... I seem to discover one or the other every month. (OK, some of them are probably ones I found before and forgot about; the point is, there are enough for that!) The Family's garden told a tale of children at play: I have a small collection of plastic toys that I've excavated from flower beds including a shark and a dinosaur. Also the swing on the pergola which was a stroke of genius.

 

The pergola leads from the lawn to the terrace at the back of the garden. For the Retiree, this was the site of an ornamental pond; for the Family, it was the location for a greenhouse; for Me it's the secret base of the briars that have annexed all land within six feet of the back fence. On occasion, I sally forth with my loppers, and the ensuing carnage results in thorny cuttings all over the terrace. Most are swept into the garden waste bag, but many escape my broom by falling into the cracks of the paving stones. In other words, the terrace is a booby-trapped no-man's land, where even the cat refuses to walk.

 

The Briars (mostly rambling roses but some brambles have enlisted as well) would probably take over the entire garden, but they're in a stand-off with the Wild Wood that is, in theory, an ornamental border along the fence. I assumed it was a single row of large shrubs and trees, until my parents peered into it and spotted camellias blooming at the back. We cut down a large box shrub to reveal them... sort of.

 They were clearly planted for winter colour, but they were barely visible and struggling for light. By summer, when the weigela had leafed and blossomed, it was even worse. 

A year later, I still haven't made it to the camellias, I still have to google the spelling of weigela, and I honestly have no idea what's in the very back corner as any path is barred by a wall of holly and bay tree. 

 

I recently pulled a three metre rose briar out of the tangle. The proper dramatic convention would have been for some clue to the mysteries beyond to emerge with it, snagged upon the thorns: a bone, a priceless artefact, a note from a long-lost castaway....  Sadly, my rambling roses are habitually inconsiderate and failed to bring back the loot.

While the Briars and the Wild Wood remain disputed territory, the young family made the rest of the garden safely accessible, even if the flower beds are still wildly overcrowded in summer. Between the pergola and the Wild Wood stands the Scarlet Grove a.k.a. the Bloody Grove a.k.a. the Emo Grove. 

 All summer long, it's a blaze of reds and hot pinks, which effectively draw the eye when you're looking up the garden from the conservatory or patio. See the below picture, taken from the patio two months later, when the lantern tree was fading but (to its right) the poppies were in neon bloom.

A sea of ornamental grass (and random individual flowers, struggling to stay afloat) divides the lawn area from the landscaping, concealing the gravel paths. We've named it Trog's Savannah, because he used to love sitting around there, chewing on the grasses and basking in the sunlight. 

The Retiree had a shed with attached greenhouse between the grasses and the lawn. The shed is still in use, but the Family tore the old greenhouse down as it was in dangerous disrepair. Over its foundation, they laid down mulch to create a play area for their children. My kids being older, we weren't sure what to do with the space, so we put down our pond-in-a-pot and stacked random garden stones (mostly found in the garage) around it. By the end of the summer, the whole area had been claimed by a jungle of giant weeds; one of this year's tasks is to excavate our own pond.

In front of the mulch is a small lawn, which brings us back to the first picture, because I don't have an updated overview: 

 

The lawn is a nice space for sitting on (but not a huge mowing commitment), with interest provided by ever more borders. The Retiree must be responsible for the inexplicable stand of bamboo (kept effortlessly out of shot by the egocentric spindle tree), but the front and rear flowerbeds may have been partly replanted by the Family: there are quite a few herbs and tactile plants popular in modern sensory gardens for young children.

 

Up until I acquired this secretive beast of a garden, I thought I didn't like gardening and wasn't any good at it. My chief (only) asset was my avidly horticultural parents, and it was on the strength of this resource that I took the plunge and bought the house. They have proved invaluable for plant identification and as an interim source of garden tools. Most of my house maintenance expenses have been on buying the necessary equipment to manage the garden.

Fortunately the most difficult and expensive part has been done for me. Thanks to the retiree, I've inherited a full collection of plants laid out to provide colour and interest year round, all of which are hardy enough to survive neglect, along with literal tonnes of landscaping material (which has fortunately been distributed in smaller weights throughout the garden). With so many resources at my disposal, my creativity has run wild, and after a year of furious internet-based self-education, I'm feeling ambitious....

 

There's a favourite quote of mine that I've always used figuratively. Now I'm taking it literally, revelling in a hobby without deadlines.* 

"Live as if you are going to die tomorrow; Garden as if you are going to live forever." 

         – Rudyard Kipling

* NB: Gardening is technically full of deadlines: tasks that must be done by a certain time of year or at a specific stage of the plant's development. I'm just ignoring them, secure in the knowledge that if the garden's survived this long, it can survive me.