Spring
We started this year with plans a plenty and soon made a start on putting some into action. The beech hedge forming the boundary alongside the lane is a lovely feature but obviously needs cutting and maintaining each year. It’s easy to deal with from the other side, but with plans for a flower and shrub bed in the garden we decided first of all to make an access path running alongside it around 2 feet wide, edged with logs and initially covered in wood chip in the hope of keeping weeds down. This works up to a point and certainly makes it easier to cut the hedge although we do have to remove armfuls of nettles on a regular basis. There was a flower bed of sorts along the length of the hedge but other than a scruffy rose and a few bulbs there was nothing really there other than weeds. We decided to enlarge the bed, taking it up to an existing gravel path, which necessitated the removal of the turf. It’s a job I hate doing but we all joined in and it wasn’t too long before a lovely wide flowerbed had been formed.
At right angles to the hedge about halfway along was another scruffy flower bed which also needed a complete overhaul. To try and break the garden up into different areas we decided to build a pergola for roses. We decided on this one afternoon and by the end of that day the bare bones of the structure was in place. We raided a large hazel bush in the far corner of the garden for all the wood to build this which was a very satisfying way of doing it.
(Ultimately though this structure was doomed to failure. It worked brilliantly to start with but under the weight of three rambler roses it blew down twice, the second time all the posts had rotted and in 2016 it was replaced with panels made from treated wood).
On the other side of the garden the boundary hedge was in a dreadful tangle. It had grown too tall and wide; being predominately hazel and hawthorn we decided the best thing to do was try and lay it. This was done over a couple of weekends and my husband found it a very satisfying task to accomplish. The hedge was hugely improved by doing this although we did feel very overlooked by the sheep in the adjoining field for a couple of years!
Summer
Work continued on digging the new flowerbed in the front garden, once all the turf was lifted it looked an enormous space to plant up. It was dug over and then the planting could begin. We started off by planting a mixture of shrubs as a framework, including Prunus Incisa kojo-no-mai, Callicarpa, Cotinus, and Buddleia. These were supplemented by hardy annuals for the first year while I tried to grow as many perennials as possible from seed.
And of course there were flowers, many of them as the summer progressed. Maybe not all in the right places but at least there was colour.
Autumn
The next major challenge in the garden was to decide what to do with the remaining double row of huge conifers on the South side of the house which formed the boundary between the garden and orchard. We had originally thought that a ‘woodland’ theme to the area alongside these trees would work but the problem was that the conifers made the area too gloomy and also made the house feel too dark inside. One day inspiration came and I decided that we should call the tree surgeon in again to remove the larger of the conifers immediately along the line of the fence. He duly came and removed several trees leaving what seemed like destruction in his wake. All the logs were stored and ultimately burnt on the woodburner, branches and woodchip were put to good use to mark out paths through what would become the ‘spring borders’. The ‘lawn’ has never quite recovered from the heavy machinery that was driven across it; deep tyre tracks had to be filled with topsoil and re-seeded, and unfortunately the resulting grass was a different shade of green to the existing and to this day you can still see where the tracks were! With the trees out of the way we set to and put up more hazel hurdles to bring back a feeling of privacy to the garden and also as a windbreak. We then discovered a small tree nursery in the village and ordered a quantity of beech hedging plants. These were delivered to us by the nursery owner freshly dug from their site and within the hour we had replanted them in the orchard along the line of the hazel hurdles.
(The beech is now forming a lovely hedge between the garden and orchard, but sadly after 9 years some of the hazel hurdles are starting to disintegrate however they have served their purpose and the beech will now form the boundary and windbreak. Over the last 9 years we have also removed the second row of conifers ourselves. They were much smaller and easier to deal with and now we are left with a couple of Silver birch and an Oak tree in this area and continue to fill in with low growing shrubs, ground cover, hellebores and spring bulbs.)
Tales from a Country Garden 