Helen's Garden Renovation Project

We have sunshine and showers forecast for the Bank Holiday weekend. Since it was doing sunshine this morning I decided it was time to start cutting bits off the two Leylandii trees that I am going to remove this autumn. They are at the left of the existing hedge. The job needs doing now because the other Leylandii need a trim, and it seems pointless to trim the two trees that I am going to remove. I intelligently ate a substantial piece of cake first to make sure I had enough fuel to complete the job.

The two left hand Leylandii will soon be removed

You can’t see all the branches that I removed in this picture, but I stacked them on the tarpaulin and there were a lot of them. I have made a start on shredding them, but this will be a two-hour job at least. Then I will have to dig up the roots. And then call in a tree surgeon to trim the remaining trees, all four of them. And then plant the new trees. I don’t know exactly how many I can fit in the space left, but at two feet apart, it should be about six.

I am pleased to announce that I did get an A star in my GCSE biology, despite not knowing how the plants under the tarpaulin were getting their carbon dioxide. I think there is nothing wrong with the difficulty of GCSEs – it’s just that the grade boundaries are very low. For Paper 2 in GCSE Biology, you only needed to get 69% to get an A star. And I don’t think any of the questions were unfair, so why have such a low boundary for the highest grade possible?

Today I bravely peeled back the tarpaulin and confronted the leafy subculture underneath.

The jungle under the tarpaulin

The dominant weed by miles is a form of umbrella grass which somebody kindly gave me several years ago. He omitted to tell me that it would take over the garden. (Why do people do this? I always tell my friends when I’m giving them something that will seed itself or do runners all over the place and which they will never ever be able to eradicate if they decide they don’t want it any more.) There was the occasional bittercress plant and some clover type stuff, but not much of it. As I pulled up the grass, I put the slugs under another part of the tarpaulin, hoping that they would get to work on whatever was under there.

I did not forget to stop and admire the garden a little. The hibiscus in the far left corner, in front of the huge blue-green conifer, is looking very pink at the moment. I don’t know whether it will get dug up and moved when the pond and lawn are built, but for now it’s staying and looking very pretty. The picture isn’t as good as it could be because the sun is too bright, but never mind. You get the idea.

Hibiscus in far left corner, looking very pink

As far as progress goes, I have cleared out the area of bare ground behind the bay tree and moved some slabs of paving foundation onto it. This will give me an additional place to put the plants when the works are carried out in the winter. But it’s still a big problem, working out where I am going to put them.