So yesterday I shared the start of our garden transformation, and to be honest we rather naively thought the remaining borders would be much easier to tackle. Needless to say, we were wrong 😄
I forgot to take a proper "before" photo, but the left-hand side of this one does give you some idea of the work to be done. From this angle it doesn't look as bad as the other two borders, but it definitely had its issues!
We decided to start in the middle and work our way back towards the house first. The border was a tangled mass of montbretia, London Pride, narcissus, dandelions, and a pretty plant with masses of white flowers that I can't remember the name of.
My word, this garden has ~ or rather, had ~ absolutely masses of montbretia! Again, as with the spring bulbs, I do like it.....but not all over my garden 😉 Luckily, we have a friend who is happy to take it off our hands for her garden. I'm glad we were able to send it to a new home, as I would have been sad to just dump it all.
It's not that easy to tell from the photo, but the mass of weeds in front of the blue chair are actually growing on a mound of soil...
...very rubbly soil. It had come from the back garden, where all the soil is full of small (and some not so small) bits of rubble from all the work we had done out there. So although we have plenty of quite good soil to make use of, it all has to be sieved first. Another back-aching exercise *sigh*
Still, we got the first half cleared; Adrian worked so hard, digging and basically clearing, whilst I came along behind him to do the more "nitty-gritty" weeding.
We dug out the rest of the border between us, making sure the plants and bulbs had a good portion of soil attached as I wanted to keep most of them. They were temporarily dumped on the weed membrane over by the peony where it was a bit more shady, and I sorted them out later. I had to separate the plants from each other, pulling out the weeds and grass that were growing through them as I went along. It was a worthwhile exercise, though, as I ended up with a good amount of "free" plants to help fill the gaps in the borders 😊
Then came the trauma of humping yet more cut-in-half sleepers from the back out to the front garden! This is a very narrow border, the width of which was governed by the fact that we have an inspection chamber relatively close to the path. As with the other borders, we took the weed membrane beneath the sleepers and fixed it on the soil side.
The curved concrete edge was obviously part of an old garden layout, which was cut in half when the concrete path was laid back in the day. The border soil was very low, so had to be topped up with a few barrow loads of sieved soil.
Once again, I raided the garden for plants to put in the new border. Some of them sulked for quite a while before perking up again, but others (such as the lillies, roses and spireae) didn't even seem to notice! In fact the roses have been totally invigorated by the move ~ they obviously didn't like where they had been planted previously.
I forgot to take a proper "before" photo, but the left-hand side of this one does give you some idea of the work to be done. From this angle it doesn't look as bad as the other two borders, but it definitely had its issues!
We decided to start in the middle and work our way back towards the house first. The border was a tangled mass of montbretia, London Pride, narcissus, dandelions, and a pretty plant with masses of white flowers that I can't remember the name of.
My word, this garden has ~ or rather, had ~ absolutely masses of montbretia! Again, as with the spring bulbs, I do like it.....but not all over my garden 😉 Luckily, we have a friend who is happy to take it off our hands for her garden. I'm glad we were able to send it to a new home, as I would have been sad to just dump it all.
It's not that easy to tell from the photo, but the mass of weeds in front of the blue chair are actually growing on a mound of soil...
...very rubbly soil. It had come from the back garden, where all the soil is full of small (and some not so small) bits of rubble from all the work we had done out there. So although we have plenty of quite good soil to make use of, it all has to be sieved first. Another back-aching exercise *sigh*
Still, we got the first half cleared; Adrian worked so hard, digging and basically clearing, whilst I came along behind him to do the more "nitty-gritty" weeding.
We dug out the rest of the border between us, making sure the plants and bulbs had a good portion of soil attached as I wanted to keep most of them. They were temporarily dumped on the weed membrane over by the peony where it was a bit more shady, and I sorted them out later. I had to separate the plants from each other, pulling out the weeds and grass that were growing through them as I went along. It was a worthwhile exercise, though, as I ended up with a good amount of "free" plants to help fill the gaps in the borders 😊
Then came the trauma of humping yet more cut-in-half sleepers from the back out to the front garden! This is a very narrow border, the width of which was governed by the fact that we have an inspection chamber relatively close to the path. As with the other borders, we took the weed membrane beneath the sleepers and fixed it on the soil side.
The curved concrete edge was obviously part of an old garden layout, which was cut in half when the concrete path was laid back in the day. The border soil was very low, so had to be topped up with a few barrow loads of sieved soil.
Once again, I raided the garden for plants to put in the new border. Some of them sulked for quite a while before perking up again, but others (such as the lillies, roses and spireae) didn't even seem to notice! In fact the roses have been totally invigorated by the move ~ they obviously didn't like where they had been planted previously.
I couldn't raise the soil level behind the curved concrete edge but hopefully the plants will eventually disguise the unattractive concrete path edge. Look how unhappy that echinops is! Thankfully it's perked up again now.
Since I took the photo above, I've added more plants that I got from Shire Plants. I've also put in small clumps of the London Pride I saved to edge the path, and will put in some of the narcissus bulbs that were dug out too.
This was a tricky piece of garden, with the path above being curved like it is. I had a good think about what to do, and plumped for using up more of the leftover rocks in an echo of the border on the "ornamental" side of the front garden. I have actually got plants in here now but haven't yet taken a photo.
We looked after Bonnie for a few days recently. She was very content to doze in the sunshine, occasionally raising her head to check that we were working hard LOL
So that's all the borders laid out now. I will gradually put in a few more plants here and there but they are basically finished. Next up will be the kitchen garden-proper, so stay tuned!
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