Helen's Garden Renovation Project

We are now having a heatwave. However, I decided to plant things anyway because tonight we have very heavy showers forecast – so heavy that the Met Office has coloured us in yellow. So I suggested another euonymus – Blondy this time.

Euonymus fortunei 'Blondy' at the front left

I have also suggested some winter-flowering jasmine.

Winter flowering jasmine

I discovered that someone else appears to have suggested some magnificent mushrooms – you can see them at the back of the euonymus picture above.

Magnificent mushrooms

So that is now 82 pots, and a 43.4% reduction. I’m not feeling hopeful that I will reach my target of 70 pots by the end of June. But it’s still quite an achievement.

We recently had our Residents’ Meeting and it was agreed that we needed more plants for the communal areas, and it was also agreed that I should suggest some plants. So, the next evening, which was dry, I went out there with my spade, trowel, hammer and chisel, and suggested the following: two vinca minor, two London Pride and two campanula portenschlagiana. After suggesting them, I put the bark back and watered them well. A couple of days later, I suggested a euonymus (the Emerald’n’Gold variety) and a rhododendron. The rhododendron was a fragment of my very early-flowering pale pink one which came off when I dug it up and which I thought I might as well stick in a pot in case it was viable. The parent rhododendron is now enormous and I don’t think I will have room for two of them in my garden. Its main disadvantage is that it is very vulnerable to frost because it flowers so early. On the other hand, when it doesn’t get frostbitten, it is a very cheering sight at the end of winter.

Communal planting after suggesting eight new plants

The edge of the area was supposed to be planted with persicaria, but for some reason it never got established. In another area, the persicaria did very well and I kept digging up bits and transplanting them, but they still didn’t get going. So I have tried three different ground cover plants. I shall see how they do, and if any of them do particularly well, I will plant some more.

The largest plant, at the back, just to the left of the lamp post, is in fact a weed, but the neighbours won’t let me dig it up because it’s doing better at providing greenery and screening than any of the proper plants. I managed to get an agreement to prune it so that the viburnum and photinia aren’t completely out-competed.

I also planted a cornflower plant in my front garden and threw away a miniature rose that had no leaves left on it. So I have reduced my pots by ten plants.

Number of pots = 84. Percentage reduction = 42%. Superb!

The weather has now gone back to normal and is sometimes dry, sometimes wet. Some of the showers have been only a few minutes long. As far as possible I have carried on through the changes – this is the great advantage of having sandy soil.

In my desperate attempts to reach my pot reduction target, I have been planting things in the front garden. This has resulted in the unintended but welcome consequence of my front garden looking a lot more like a garden than a campanula farm.

In front of the fence panel to the left of the garden, I have planted a Euonymus fortunei ‘Emerald ‘n’ Gold’. This is the same variety that I planted at the left of the thuja hedge in the back garden. To the left of the Euonymus I have planted some fox and cubs (Hieracium aurantiacum) which Sharon gave me. Some people think it’s a weed. I think it’s a nice plant. I also planted some alchemilla mollis next to my neighbour’s path, as I think I can rely on that plant to behave itself and not send out huge great flowering stalks for my neighbours to trip over. On the right I planted three oriental poppies. They will produce very big orange-red flowers, unless they are a different variety to the one I think they are. So that’s seven pots gone.

Front left of garden with euonymus, hieracium, alchemilla and papaver orientalis

And then I planted some geranium cinereum under the magnolia. The space used to be covered with osteospermum, but it has suffered a lot from two cold winters in a row and I would like to have something a bit less prone to frostbite alongside it. The flowers won’t clash.

Front garden by the magnolia grandiflora

So that’s three more pots gone. I have also done a mildly ruthless cull. When I dug up the viburnum I put some of it in pots (it layers itself to produce more plants) and so I had three viburnums. I think it’s unlikely that I will have room for even one viburnum in the new plan, but I don’t want to throw all of them away in case I change my mind. So I threw away one. I also disposed of an iris foetidus (I have several of these, split up from a plant kindly donated by my mum) and some lily of the valley (again, I have too many of these).

So that means I have 94 pots. This is a reduction of 35% and is only 24 off my target. Unfortunately I have no idea how I am going to get rid of another 24 pots before the end of the month. I will have to give the matter some thought.

Last week one of my students kindly gave me a fuchsia as a leaving present. She is Alice Hoffman (the fuchsia, not the student).

Fuchsia Alice Hoffman

Fortunately I am not target-driven so I thought, “What a lovely fuchsia. It’s a long time since I’ve had one of those”. I did not feel anxious about the effects on my pot reduction target.

However, I thought that today, after a lot of rain, it would be a good time to do some planting and thus reduce the pots anyway. I planted five of my seven pots of black grass (Ophiopogon Nigrescens) in front of the pyracantha. I like the black grass because it is an unusual plant, but I haven’t really decided what the best thing to do with it is. I thought that next to the pyracantha it might contrast well with the orange berries. I don’t know how well it will get on in this position because there isn’t much light, but I still have two pots left to plant somewhere else if this turns out to be a bad location.

Ophiopogon Nigrescens in front of the pyracantha

And then I thought I should take advantage of the relatively untapped resource of the front garden. I planted a euonymus between the hibiscus and the dead passion flower.

Euonymus fortunei Blondy

So that is a gain of one pot and a loss of six. This is 107 pots, down from 145 initially, a reduction of 26.2%.

Since my last post I have not done as much gardening as I have been used to, because recently it has started raining sometimes. My main job has been moving soil from the new lawn area to the areas to the left and rear of the new lawn to level the ground. I intend to leave myself with a nice neat cuboid shaped hole which will allow me to calculate the volume of soil I need to order to fill it. The ground levelling is a good rehearsal for the lawn project. For planting shrubs, the soil does not need to be dead level because a few small bumps and hollows won’t show. The lawn will be less tolerant. I have been sawing Leylandii branches into small lengths – about 10 cm long – and hammering them into the ground until their tops are level with the lawn edging. The books say you should use pegs and have a mark on the peg that is a few centimetres from the top, and get that mark level with the soil, but I don’t want to do that because I want to put the tarpaulin back on the ground when I have finished and not have it tear when it gets caught on a peg. It also seems to me to be an over elaborate method. The only advantage as far as I can tell is that it is easier to find the pegs again if the tops are not level with the soil. But I know where I put the markers because I am using a grid spacing equal to the length of my spirit level. And I don’t really mind if I lose a marker or two, as they will just rot down into the soil.

Today I decided it was time to try using the front garden to help get rid of the pots. So I started pulling up the very invasive campanula that lives there normally.

Front garden under window before planting

I dug over the soil with a trowel and tried to remove as many campanula roots as possible without pulling up too many wisteria or spiraea roots. I think I will keep an eye on the area and squirt any emerging campanula with glyphosate. It is a lovely plant, but I am fed up with it taking over and choking out everything else that tries to grow next to it.

And then I planted the acca sellowiana (aka feijoa) which was certainly ready to come out of its pot, and also one of the coronillas that Burncoose Nursery sent me in error. As usual, I put some bits of paving slab over the bare earth to discourage cats and weeds. I think I have probably tried to plant too many shrubs in the space, but I will have to see how they get on.

Front garden under window after planting

And that is now 112 pots, which is a reduction of 22.8%.