Project: Garden

The BF and I moved here three years ago. We have been gradually working our way through the house and were about to start work on the living room... but then we got the cats. So, attention has switched to the garden, which I have been mostly ignoring.

We've decided to lay a patio at the back of the garden and remove the existing path at the front, by the French doors, and lay a matching path. (The patio will be in the large gravel square in the top right hand corner of the garden and in the gravel patch, at the bottom of the photograph, will
be some raised flower beds).



As this is a new house, there is about an inch of top soil - below which is rubble. So, one of today's jobs was attempting to repair the lawn. (It is going to be a while before we get the patio and the lawn is already down to about 50% grass, 50% moss/buttercups/bare soil).

Last week's work began with cutting back the decimated fuchshia to its stumps. The shrub usually takes up the whole of that corner, but it needed Spring pruning. Power saws are the way forward.



At the right side of the garden was a patch of shrubs. This is a new house - the gardens were over planted with tiny plants, which became a mesh of tangles and twists. This bed is in the wettest, shadiest, mossiest part of the garden. So the plan was to cut down and dig it up. I'm nearly there but there are a few root stumps that are proving difficult. Did I mention that power saws are the way forward?



And here's where the branches are currently residing. I did think about transplanting them to other parts of the garden, but I was unable to separate them.



So, last week was all about destruction.

This week I planted two clematis cuttings in the tall pot where the bougainvillea resided last Summer. Last Winter was surprisingly unkind.



And I replanted two hanging baskets - ivy, petunia, impatiens and trailing lobelia.



It has been a good day.