Garden: Time for Some Landscaping.

Making a field into a garden with no money is turning out to be much harder than we expected.  We've been here four years now and in the ornamental garden have so far just planted half a dozen random shrubs and replaced the home-made cobble paths (cobbles dug from the veg garden) with ghastly but practical concrete slabs.  My attempt at a flight of steps up the bank have also been replaced by those slabs, but nicely faced with timber from the forest or flat slabs of boulder.  Where native trees (birch, ash, willow) have established themselves in sensible places like tops of banks they have been encouraged.

Any spare money has to date just been ploughed back into improving the soil in the productive garden but this year we have gone mad and so far spent a few hundred Euro on bare rooted shrubs and perennials.

Thirty odd bare rooted shrubs and hedging plants in the buckets and the same again of perennials potted up, with another dozen shrubs in pots.  That is going to be a lot of watering if we have a hot summer!

If our previous plantings are anything to go by, it it will take a couple of years for hedges to be hedge-like and borders border-ish.  But it is a start!

My aim is to divide the spaces up and at the same time bring beauty and wildlife in, especially giving us much help to the beleaguered bees as possible.

The first task is to complete the frontage as we now have a proper drive rather than the rutted track that was washed down into the road with every downpour, albeit a plug ugly but cheap and practical concrete drive and gates, too.

Pillars for gates in place.  A couple of bamboos are on the boundary to the left.

The gates, and therefore any hedge or fence which will complete the enclosure at the front are about seven or eight metres up from the road.  We could either run a hedge from the gates back down either side of the drive to the road and then along the front or simply continue the line of the gates, neatly leaving a bit of the garden on the outside.  This actually is the most aesthetically pleasing thing to do as it will then continue the run of our neighbour's fence on the right.  Our drive runs up beside his garden and our house and bulk of the garden sits behind his.

We planted a couple of bamboos which should grow like stink in order to screen the house from the road.  Four years on they are goodish clumps but a few years off being a screen.  Typical of our clay soil, plants take a few years to establish a healthy root system (or just die) before much activity is seen above ground.  A keria japonica, planted in year one and tucked in behind them seems to love the shade from the willow tree above and is thriving.  Eventually it will fill the space between the bamboos and the new hedge that will run from the left hand pillar in the photo above to the woods.

Standing on the corner beside our neighbour.  The new hedge runs from this concrete post through the forsythia dead ahead to the gates and then on to the woods.  The bamboo is the green mass centre shot.

Rather than a hedge in the conventional manner, we are going for a row of shrubs which can be pruned as needed.  Light, airy and flowery rather than a solid feature.  It'll be voluptuous not neat.  Well, that is the plan.  So, between the left hand pillar and the woods we will have a forsythia (boring, yes - but they do well and early flowers are cheering after a dank winter), a photinia red robin (again, they do very well around these parts, and did I mention that we are on a budget and they are cheap...) a flowering currant and a golden euonymus japonica.  On the other side we already have a large forsythia in the middle, so will add a rose of sharon, purple buddleia, another flowering currant a philadelphus natchez, a hardy fuchsia (to remind me of Devon hedges), a choisya and a viburnum tinus.  So nothing flash, fancy or expensive.

Some will be left to be rampant others will be pruned hard, although given that nothing is bigger than 30cm other than the established forsythia, they can all be left to do their own thing this year at least!  More photos to follow in a few years.