Bootiful plants

Went shopping for plants today armed with a carefully researched wish list. Thank you to brother-in-law Carl for sharing his knowledge and experience of what works well together.

Tomorrow we start planting!

Royal Wedding Day!

Best wishes to Wills and Kate!


Day off from gardening today - just some gentle planting planning.


There's a Royal Wedding rose and a Royal Wedding poppy. Should we include those?

Compost heap to parking

Remember this from March?

Well after much blood, sweat and tears it now looks like this and will be used for parking cars so we can make better use of the area in front of the house.

Taking shape

Getting there! The parterre bed is just about ready for planting now.

Can you picture the bride and groom standing in the middle, surrounded by delphiniums and poppies, making their vows?

Add large amounts of well-rotted compost and work to a fine tilthe

The soil in the parterre bed is beginning to resemble a fine tilthe. Digging in barrow-load after barrow-load of compost from the compost heap is a back-breaking task, but has the dual benefit of clearing that space while enriching the new bed. It will be worth the pain!

Wall bed ready to receive plants

One more bed ready! It's 2m deep by 15m wide. That's a lot of space to fill with plants!

The gunnera will be going in the permanently wet area in the far corner, with irises, agapanthus and echinops in the drier areas. Any other suggestions?

Hanging basket graveyard

Our predecessor in this house was the queen of hanging baskets. And at the end of every year she (or her gardener) up-ended them into the compost heap, where the roots continued to grow into a solid mass. We estimate that today we removed the contents of at least 50 baskets - some with the liner still attached and some complete with rusty wire basket. One even had this little chap attached. Wonder how long he'd  been buried there.

... go!

The first flowerbed has been dug! We rotivated, shovelled compost, rotivated, shovelled compost and rotivated again. Haven't quite achieved a fine tilth yet - but there's always tomorrow.

Thank you to our enthusiastic helpers! As you sip champagne here in 446 days time, remember this day!

Ready, steady ...

Tomorrow sees the start of Operation Flowerbeds. Today we marked out the beds with spray paint. Getting everything perpendicular was no mean feat. Pythagoras tells us that the diagonal of a right-angled triangle with sides 7 m is about 9.9 m, which should have helped. But trying to measure accurately with a tape measure that stretches, twists and gets caught on dandelions is not easy. But got there in the end.

We labelled the area that will be patio so that no-one digs that up tomorrow by mistake.

Griff's little adventure

Griff, the temporarily resident cat, got himself in a bit of bother yesterday and came home with a scratch on his nose. Must have ventured into someone else's territory. Or maybe he picked a fight with a deer! Go Griff!

Doesn't seem to be causing him any concern - he still rolls ecstatically in the dustiest patch of earth he can find.

Phew - What a Scorcher! - for April

The forecast was for 25°C today (that's 77 in old money, Bob). Amazing for April. Hope this isn't the only summer we get though.

Is there any sight more glorious than fresh green birch leaves against a bright blue sky?

Look no shed!

Isn't that a more attractive area in the front garden - even before the debris is cleared? One day there will be a gate in the hedge to give us pedestrain access to the road at the front of the house. And there will be a path to the front door lined by cottage garden plants that deer don't like to eat (are there any?).

Here today, gone tomorrow - thank you Freecycle!

Put this shed (18 ft by 7ft) on Freecycle this morning and had loads of enquiries within minutes, It will be going to a good home in the neighbouring village tomorrow. Isn't Freecycle wonderful - someone gets a large shed for free and we get an unwanted shed taken away.

We've made our bed ...

... and would quite like to have laid in it by the time we'd finished! We dug umpteen barrow-loads of compost out of the compost heap and into the clay and sand. It was hard work. But now we've got somewhere safe from deer to grow roses. We hope!

New flowerbed opportunity

Stage 2 of the deer fencing is nearly complete. It looks a bit stark at the moment, but some planting in front of it should help. Had a nasty moment when I realised I hadn't considered whether the gate was wide enough for the lawnmower and the wheelbarrow - but that seems to be OK.

How we get the marquee in is a challenge for another day!

Viola with added greenfly

What an exquisite flower the viola is. Unfortunately this one seems to have arrived with a greenfly in residence. It wasn't visible to the naked eye (well, not my naked eye anyway) but when I uploaded the photo, there it was. Is there a moral there?

Oh so tempting!

My mother and I visited a garden centre today and I was very tempted by the wonderful displays of flowers. Unfortunately there is just nowhere to plant anything yet so settled for some pansies for the pots.

Crumble, pie or snow?

Probably a bit early to looking out recipes for apples, but the blossom is looking wonderful and I have high hopes of a bumper crop. I am an eternal optimist!

Operation Construct Flowerbeds

Preparations for the construction of the flowerbeds over the Easter weekend continue. Muscle is lined up and the hydraulic rotivator is booked. The spray paint and measuring wheel have arrived so we can start marking out the beds.

(I ought to be negotiating a discount for all this product placement.)

Anyone for tennis?

The family who lived in this house for 39 years, until 1995, levelled part of the back garden and installed a tennis court. The court is long gone, but we are still finding ancient tennis balls around the garden. This one was buried deep inside a massive clump of couch grass which I dug up today.

And here are the stripes!

OK, they maybe slightly straggley stripes - but it's an awful lot better than it looked at the beginning of the weekend, believe me!

Please keep off the grass ... mowing in progress

No idea where this sign came from originally. It does rather look as if it was liberated from a municipal park some time ago. We unearthed it from the undergrowth when we began our major clearing exercise last Summer and it has graced the front lawn ever since. No-one takes any notice of it, of course.

The lawn is being mown as I type. Hopefully there will be a picture of stripes tomorrow!

A clattering of jackdaws

Griff, the temporarily resident cat, caused mayhem today when he climbed to the top of a blocked up chimney. I knew something was amiss by the terrific noise the displaced jackdaws were making. They must have called in reinforcements from neighbouring colonies because there were at least two dozen of them trying to frighten Griff off by shrieking at him. They certainly merit their collective noun of a "clattering".

Griff just turned his back on them and surveyed his kingdom.

Unexpected gem

Look what just appeared, wedged between a shed and a very tired old rhododendron - this glorious specimen. It definitely didn't flower last year, so maybe all the cutting back and thinning out that we have done since then gave it enough light to burst into life this year. Or maybe it just felt it was its turn.

Cat heaven

Our temporarily resident cat, Griff, was allowed out in the garden for the first time today and thought he'd gone to heaven. There were butterflies to chase, moss to roll in, sheds to climb on and sunshine to bask in. Just too exciting!

Looking forward to the scent of new-mown grass

When we first moved here the question my husband was asked most frequently was "Are you going to get a ride-on lawnmower?". (It was mainly men asking this, I have to say). Tempting as it was, we've finally settled on a self-propelled petrol mower, with a roller to give those traditional stripes, which will hopefully arrive tomorrow. Weather-permitting the grass will get its first cut this weekend.

How did we manage before the internet?

A day for armchair gardening today. I've spent more hours than are good for me on the computer finding somewhere to hire a rotavator, researching the best price for lawnmowers and getting ideas for plants that will enjoy the various habitats in this garden. Armchair gardening might be easier on the back, but it's tough on the credit card. 

Evidence of growth

What a glorious Spring day it has been for working in the garden. After a surprise Mother's Day breakfast and two wonderful bunches of flowers, it was back to work - weeding, raking, levelling and heavy duty root removal. We are both a little weary now, but seeing things start to grow makes it all worth while. This is one of the new (caged) apple trees postively bursting into leaf.

One month later ...

I started this blog on 1 March and whilst we have done lots of planning and preparation in the last month, there's a long way to go before we can get on with serious planting.

Most of the colour in the garden at the moment comes from naturalised hedgerow plants, like this lovely little violet and a wonderful display of primroses.

However, April should see a marked increase in activity. There's the "eleven day" break to look foward to at the end of the month. We have a garden working party planned for that period, after which I'm sure our helpers will be begging to be allowed to go back to work for a rest!

Driest March for 100 years

Despite the rain over the last few days, March 2011 could turn out to be the driest in England and Wales for 100 years, according to the Met Office.

I've been religiously watering the new birch trees, apple trees and laurel bushes every day and thankfully they are all looking healthy so far. We were advised to bury a plastic bottle, with its bottom cut off, by the root ball of the trees as we planted them. This has certainly made it easier to get water to the roots.

But with the water butt empty we are now relying on mains water. Maybe this wasn't the best year to decide to move to metered water!