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Planting the Magnolia border
Garden transformation Part 18 – View from the Kitchen. The magnolia border is a rectangular border 8ft wide & 11ft long. It is in the corner of the L-shaped patio, and the bed you look out on from the kitchen window. The plan of the garden all started with six raised vegetable beds and everything else grew out from them. As these beds are symmetrical it left two rectangles just off the patio. The one on the left is the quince bed, which is included in the kitchen garden, with artichokes. On the right-hand side is the magnolia bed which is part of the ornamental garden. Looking out from the…
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Digging up the lawn
Garden transformation Part 17 – What no lawn! Lawn hater? No of course not! I love a beautifully manicured, luscious green lawn as much as anyone, but not enough to want to look after one myself, a lawn through my eyes is another border waiting to happen – more plants to buy. Considering how much I love gardening, I’ve never liked mowing the lawn and that goes for my husband too. At the risk of getting hate mail from all of you lawn lovers, which in Britain let’s face it, is a lot of you! I think a lawn is the highest maintenance area of any garden – that’s if…
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Creating a Woodland border
Garden transformation Part 16 – Colour at last! The woodland border runs down the right-hand side of the garden in front of the holly hedge. It starts by, what is now the bamboo bed and finishes by the large yellow Irish yew tree ‘Taxus baccata Fastigiata Aurea’. It is a partially shaded border. Winter 2013 – Spring 2014 When we moved here there was no border down most of the hedge. At the end nearest to the house there was one very large conifer that started on the patio and spread around the corner. Then two more conifer trees down the length, they had grown over into the hedge and…
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Creating the Pathways
Garden transformation Part 15 – A long walk. We’ve ended up with 237 feet/72.2 metres of pathways, mainly the consequence of having such a long garden! The raised vegetable beds have also contribute though. It’s certainly good for our step count, especially if you keep forgetting your tools! The vegetable beds were the first part of the garden to be designed, there are six of them and we wanted descent pathways around them. The main priority was to make sure we could comfortably wheel the wheelbarrow around. June 2014 As we both hate mowing grass, we had no intentions of keeping any lawn. Each time we took a little more…
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The Joys of June
I’ve finally come down off cloud nine after my brief appearance on Gardeners World at the beginning of the month. I think I’m now at the end of all the teasing about wanting my autograph! What strange weather we’ve been having. No wonder us Brits never stop talking about it! The coldest rainiest May followed by a super hot dry June – until now….. The flower borders are loving this hot spell especially the roses, which I don’t think I’ve ever seen looking so good As for the veg garden’s all over the place, some things doing well – like the rhubarb. All that rain followed by this warm sunshine…
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Gardening on an Ice-Age Glacier
Garden transformation Part 14 – Soil, rocks and pebbles Before moving here I’d only had one other garden, it had beautiful black soil that your spade just sunk into, it was black gold. On moving to our new garden however, we discovered that the soil is almost 50% stone. Not only does your spade not go in, but neither does your fork! The only way to dig our soil is with a mattock or a pick. Even when you’ve loosened it, trying to get your shovel in is still a challenge as it hits numerous rocks and pebbles. After hubby breaking the wooden handles on our existing pick and my…
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The White garden
Garden transformation Part 13 – Flowers at last! When I first started gardening, all my favourite flowers were white. Although as like many newbie gardeners, I initially relied on other gardeners giving me free plants that they had split. These were of course made up of all colours and I soon came to appreciate the importance of colour in the garden. Now I can’t imagine the garden without the areas of bright contrasting colours. I certainly wouldn’t have contemplated a white garden unless I had space for both. You get so much inspiration from other gardeners and when the late Christopher Lloyd started appearing regularly on Gardeners World from his…
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Gardeners World, an inspiration!
What an absolute thrill to have appeared on Gardeners World, albeit very briefly. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I would appear on my favourite TV programme. I’ve watched pretty much every episode for the last thirty years, back to when the late, great Geoff Hamilton was presenting, from Barnsdale. I’d just got my first garden and I knew nothing. My dad had been a very keen gardener, growing all his own veg, but sadly he’d died when I was a young teenager. Geoff took me, metaphorically by the hand, and guided me every week in his gentle, down to earth way, in the art of gardening. The…
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Snowing in June?
Or just willow seeds floating on the breeze. Our beautiful blue sky’s last weekend have been full of drifting white clouds of what looked like snow. But with temperatures in the 20’s that would be unlikely! It’s willow tree seeds inside their fluffy white parachutes. For three days our skies have been full of it. We notice it every year, but this time there has been so much more than usual. My sister came over for lunch, and as we all sat in the garden it floated around us. Unfortunately this included landing in our food. We all commented that it looked like snow flurries, but rather than melt, it…
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Dreaming of a pond
Garden transformation Part 12 – My first pond I’ve always felt incredibly grateful for the childhood I had. Growing up in Cheshire meant lots of ponds and ditches. There is a wonderful site Cheshire Wildlife Trust telling you all about ponds and wildlife in Cheshire. They do a lot of good work to try and protect Cheshire wildlife. I was a child that liked water very much. Even when my dad was washing his car, I’d be there trying to dam the water to stop it reaching the grid. My love of ponds really started though at primary school. When we were seven the wonderful teacher we had, was a…
