Helen's Garden Renovation Project

I decided to try a new way of removing Leylandii, now that I am so experienced at digging up trees. Normally I cut through the trunk at about six feet above the ground so that the tree isn’t so tall and heavy. But I decided to remove the tree whole this time, mainly because the trunk is very thick and would be hard work to saw through while the tree was vertical. Firstly, on Friday I dug away the soil around the rootball and cut through all the small roots. This took two hours.

Preparatory digging to expose the roots

Then I tied the tree to the ones next to it, using two ropes. I sawed through the biggest roots, which took about half an hour, and then I gave the tree a little push to encourage it to fall in a direction where the greenhouse wasn’t.

Tree beginning to topple over

Then I gradually paid out the top rope and let the tree continue to fall.

Timber!

And finally I took a picture of myself standing next to the tree (and the intact greenhouse) after it had finished falling down.

Tree now successfully horizontal

Then I decided I had had enough of sawing through things, and did a bit of quiet weeding until it started raining. I think getting rid of a tree this size on your own is a bit like walking across hot coals – it looks as if it is very dangerous and scary, but actually it isn’t, as long as you understand some physics and have some good strong rope (rope probably less of an advantage for coal walking).

Mathematicians and scientists will have spotted a problem with my method for getting rid of four trees in this way. It requires at least n + 1 trees, where n is a positive integer, because you have to tie the tree you are removing to another tree. There will therefore be a problem with the implementation after I have removed three trees. However, the middle of the three remaining trees has a trunk division at an easy height to reach, so I will tie the two small upper trunks to the other trees, cut them off, and then remove the trees at each end, using the middle one as the support, and then I will dig up the middle one without the help of ropes because it will be short enough to do this under control.

No brimstone butterflies today. I think it was too damp and cloudy.

After my plants from Buckingham Nurseries arrived, I ordered some more plants from Burncoose Nurseries in Cornwall. Their plants were more expensive than those from Buckingham Nurseries (although bigger) but they do an excellent range of plants that are hard to get from anywhere else. I ordered an acca and a kalmia. The kalmia, together with the holly that I bought from Buckingham Nurseries, will replace the bay tree and will help shield the compost bins from view. I also ordered a skimmia to go in the side border. I wanted a female one because it does berries and because there are some male ones in the communal shrubbery on the other side of the road, and I thought it was a bit of a waste having male skimmias if there weren’t any female ones for them to have berries with.

Last Friday my package arrived, and I was very pleased it was so quick, as the website had said the kalmia was out of stock. But then I pulled out the delivery note, and saw that the package apparently contained three Coronilla plants for someone in Whitby with a very similar surname to mine. The courier was long gone, and I realised that I had to unpack the parcel, whatever it contained, because otherwise the plants would die. So I unpacked it and it did indeed contain three Coronillas.

Burncoose Nurseries kindly let me keep the Coronillas, which was sensible because I don’t think they would have been very healthy after having two journeys in a cardboard box, and so I had to look them up on the Internet because I had never heard of them. Apparently it’s a very nice plant, which flowers a lot, but can be susceptible to a very cold winter. I think I will plant one of them in my front garden, by the house wall, where it will get lots of sun and a bit of frost protection. They don’t live very long even if they don’t get frozen to death, so I may take some cuttings in the summer if I decide I like it. But by then the acca may well be big enough to take up all the available space itself, so I may not want to plant a replacement coronilla. Anyway, events like this are why it is difficult to work out a planting plan.

Burncoose Nurseries sent out my proper order straight away, and here is a picture of my new plants. I have given one of the coronillas to my friend Sharon (whose husband Graham helped me demolish the last lot of Leylandii).

Acca, kalmia, skimmia and coronillas

The first part of the week has been quite dull and rainy, although I haven’t minded because I have been working and not gardening. This morning, however, gave us some abundant sunshine, and some warmth, and it was the most glorious thing to be out there, savaging the Leylandii.

I looked under the tarpaulin to see how much water was in the pond, and it was bone dry, despite the fact that it rained nearly all day yesterday, and has been raining a lot on other days too. This is brilliant news because it means that either the concrete has finished curing and giving off water, or I have found a more effective way of keeping the rain out. And either of those is good. I shall give it another two weeks, and if there is still no water in the pond, I may dare to hope that it is time to give it some more coats of pond paint.

The shallow pond has filled up a lot. And this morning, for the first time, I saw dead frogs on the road. I don’t really want them to spawn in the shallow pond because I need to seal the concrete and remove any concrete debris that has fallen in it first. If they do, I will put the spawn in the temporary pond, and the newts will eat it, and that will be very sad but no sadder than the frogs getting run over.

Spring has come. The evidence is as follows:

Pink pulmonaria

The pink pulmonaria has been in flower for at least a couple of weeks, but the blue pulmonaria hasn’t quite got going yet.

Early rhododendron in full bloom

My earliest rhododendron is gorgeous this year because there has been no frost since its buds started opening.

I saw my first brimstone butterfly.

I sowed some hellebore seeds from Chiltern Seeds last year. They wanted to be left for a certain number of weeks at a complicated temperature, so I put them in the fridge and then took them out, but nothing happened, so I put them outside, with the pot still inside a plastic bag, and when I looked at them this morning, there were two seedlings.

So it is definitely spring.

Apart from monitoring the seasons, I went to the dump with some rubble, and chopped some more bits off the Leylandii. When the soil dries out a bit more I am now ready to dig the first one up.

We have had even more rain since my last post. Today I lifted the tarpaulin off part of the pond and scooped out a bucketful of water from the centre of the pond. There was too much to mop up with newspapers, as I had originally planned to do. But the good news is that the water was much less black than it has been. I suppose I will have to wait until the water is completely clean before I can declare the pond has finished drying out and that it is time to recoat the concrete. I still have no idea how long that will be. But at least things are going the right way.

Meanwhile, we had a dry day yesterday and last night, so this morning was a reasonable day for gardening. I cut some bits off the Leylandii, shredded them and put them in my council garden waste bags. I also cut some bits off the bay tree and shredded them, but I kept the shreddings for my compost bin – I don’t want to put too much Leylandii in my compost in case it makes it too acidic.

These days I am doing a lot of staring at the garden and wondering what to do with it. I think one thing that is important is to work out where my main routes are. For example, how do I get to the large blue conifer at the bottom left of the garden? And how will I access my apple trees and vegetable plots? I don’t want to be walking across the lawn too much, although the occasional journey won’t matter.

I also realise that the view from the kitchen window is absolutely crucial. This is what I have at the moment:

View from kitchen window

And this is a higher-resolution picture of part of the view:

A close up view of the camellia, pond, bay tree and rubble

As you can see, there is a lot of rubble there at the moment. The bay tree still just about hides the compost bins from view. The compost bins are not that ugly, but I prefer to have plants in front of them, and I will have to work out where I can put them and still have a path leading to the compost bins. The bay tree, as I said earlier, is going because it is right where I want to put the path.

The rubble piles are decreasing, as I have been to the local tip twice since the landscaping work was done. It is best to go there early as there is no queue. There were also two nice young men working there, whose eyes lit up at the sight of a lady unloading her car into the rubble bin and rushed over to compete for the privilege of lifting the biggest piece out of the boot. I was grateful, as it is a lot easier to lift heavy things into the boot than it is to lift them out again. (This is simple physics – the hardest part of lifting a heavy thing is when your arms are outstretched. When you put the heavy thing into the boot, you are controlling its descent downwards, which is not very hard. When you lift it out, you have to lift it upwards with your arms stretched out, which is harder). I will have to go a few more times when I take up the path at the left hand side of the garden.

The Met Office is promising us a dry spell after half term, so I am hoping it is right. If so, I will carry on with soil shifting and I will dig out the Leylandii roots. And then it really will be time to start planting things.

After all the useful dry weather, we have had a spell of rain. It’s still possible to do Leylandii pruning when it’s been raining for a long time, but I will have to wait for the soil to dry off a bit before I do any more soil moving.

My plants from Buckingham Nurseries arrived.

New plants from Buckingham Nurseries

As there is a possibility of some colder weather in the next week, I decided to put some bubble wrap around their pots. I usually take a Spartan approach to plants, but they are only lickle and I don’t want any of them freezing to death before I’ve had a chance to plant them.

I am getting a little worried about the pond. Some more water got in, which wasn’t surprising after the very heavy rain, and the oily patches are back. I think yet more pond paint is washing off. I think I shall have to mop it up with newspapers and stuff it into charity bags to get rid of it, as I don’t want to pour any more onto the soil and I don’t want to carry buckets of it through the garden in case I spill it and stain the paving slabs. I readjusted the tarpaulin. It is very difficult to get it to stay in a tent shape because if there are any local minima in the structure, they fill up with water when it rains, and become even bigger minima as the weight of the water pulls them lower. I could do with a wooden frame to hold the tarpaulin in a tent shape. I could reuse the frame in autumn to keep the leaves out. That could be quite useful, but I need to design it so it doesn’t take up a lot of storage space.

The landscaping work is now all done and paid for, and I have my garden back again. I have been spending a lot of time moving some of the piles of earth about and making the surface approximately level again. I have been clearing up bits of loose rubble and sand because they will make the soil alkaline, which is no good for rhododendrons and the pieris. I have also covered up some of the bare areas with tarpaulins – sorry to the two readers who didn’t like the tarpaulins very much. Although the cats have mostly stayed out of my garden, despite all the lovely crumbly earth, they don’t stay out completely. It’s much better than it was before I got the cat repellers, but they are not 100% effective. Also, tarpaulins do cut down the weeds quite dramatically.

The tarpaulins are back again

Today, for a change, I was going to do something about the raised pond. It has rained very slightly since the pond was painted, and there were some little puddles of water that looked a bit oily. So I thought I would remove that water, and wipe the surface dry, and then start filling it from my water butts. But when I scooped the water out of the bottom of the pond, I found that it was quite thick with black pigment. And the concrete underneath was showing. In fact, the pond paint had never managed to dry in some places, and the coverage was not very good at all! I scooped out all the water and wiped the surface dry with paper towels, which were thoroughly blackened.

Poor coverage of black pond paint

My theory is that the concrete is still curing, and giving off water. This has prevented the pond paint from drying and has also led to the creation of little puddles, which may not all be rain water. The only solution is to wait. I have bought some clear waterproofing paint to use on the mortar joining the blocks and the liner of the shallow pond, and that says that I should wait “some weeks” for the render to cure. Although the black pond paint is a different product, I expect the same rules apply. I was not worried about Richard applying the pond paint so soon after making the pond because I know that different rules apply to professionals. For example, you or I would wait four hours for a coat of emulsion to dry before applying another coat. A professional will cheerfully apply three coats in a morning, and two years later the paint still hasn’t fallen off the ceiling. But I think in this case even professional courtesy was not enough for the pond paint to set.

So I have put the tarpaulin back over the pond. I have put blocks and some of my blue plastic boxes on the pond shelf so that that tarpaulin is a tent, with all three corners held down. This means that some rain may blow in through the edges, but more importantly, air can circulate and the concrete will have a chance of curing. I think that when the landscaping company put the tarpaulin on to keep the water out, they may have sealed off the area too thoroughly, thus slowing down the drying process. I will check the pond for puddles every week or so and adjust the tarpaulin as necessary, and when there is a dry day in March or April, I will brush off any paint that flakes off, give it a good wash with clean water, dry it, and paint it myself, following the instructions on the tin. I would like to use black paint, but unfortunately I am quite capable of spilling and splashing it everywhere, all over my lovely expensive blocks and slabs. Fortunately I am also quite capable of covering the entire outside of the pond with newspaper, held on with sellotape or masking tape. I will just have to wait for a good long dry spell, without too much wind (so the newspaper doesn’t blow away).

So for now the pond is sitting quietly, hardening itself off, and I can concentrate on the plants. I have ordered two new thuja plants from Buckingham Nurseries. Since carriage is £8.95, I also had to order some holly (Ilex J.C. van Tol), some pyracantha to stop the foxes breaking my new fence panel and some chaenomeles to grow against the side fence. The total price was £28.20 which is great value for seven plants. The holly is a female, self fertile, non-prickly plant which I am going to use instead of the bay tree to hide the compost bins.

Final note: I think that I should add, in fairness, that the company I used is highly professional and they would probably come and sort out the pond paint problem if I asked them to. I have decided that I will do it myself because I can choose optimal conditions for the job, and will be able to leave the ideal period between coats, and I won’t have to make any arrangements to leave the garden open for them if I am out, and so on.