Helen's Garden Renovation Project

Today was the warmest day of the year so far, and I decided that it was the first day of spring because I saw my first brimstone butterfly of the year.

Yesterday and today I was able at last to get on with mortaring the log effect stepping stones in place. As these are about a third of the size of the square ones, it was a much easier job. As the great tits shrieked, “Teacher! Teacher!” I laid four stones over the two days. It was quite hard to get a good picture because it was so sunny, but here’s my best effort.

First four log-effect stepping stones

The black plant trays are there so I could put them on top of the stepping stones after photographing them. This reminds me not to walk on them. I find it very hard to remember otherwise. It’s possible that tomorrow may be another dry day, and I may be able to get another two in place, and then I will be more than halfway there. I am so looking forward to being able to plant things in the area.

The two main events this week have been firstly that I got a new fence, which not only is staying put in the wind, but looks extremely smart.

New back fence

The fence is made of concrete, with wooden panels that can be taken out and replaced if necessary. As all the fences that I have responsibility for are now made of concrete, I am hoping that I will never need any more fencing replaced, apart from the panels when foxes and badgers make holes in them. Note to anyone thinking of putting up a concrete fence themselves: the gravel boards weigh 56 kg and the posts weigh even more. Not something I would attempt, despite my twenty-five years of weight training.

Also, my plants from J Parkers came. Hooray! I emailed them about my order just over a week ago, and they responded by sending it out immediately. Although I was a bit worried about my poor plants spending a weekend in a cardboard box in the dark, they didn’t seem to mind much.

Plants from J Parkers

Top row, left to right: Kiwi Oriental Delight (yes, a real edible one), Euonymus europaeus Red Cascade, Rhododendron Marcel Menard. Next row: Sarcococca Purple Stem. Next row: Blueberries. Bottom row: Leucothoe Scarletta, Callicarpa Profusion.

They all arrived in pots, except the Euonymus, which was bare root. I soaked it in a bucket for an hour, and then put it in a pot with some compost to keep it happy until I can plant it. You are supposed to heel in bare root plants, but I find putting them in a pot is more convenient and doesn’t seem to kill them.

The plants are small, but then I wanted small ones, given that we will have a hosepipe ban starting next week and it’s unlikely it will be lifted until the winter. They look healthy and chirpy enough, so I am pleased.

Roger, the fence man, managed to tip a load of soil and rubble on top of my alchemilla in the front garden while replacing a fence post for my neighbour, which I told him was extremely unsporting. I think some people are plant-blind – they genuinely don’t see plants when they are working in the garden, unless the plants are more than 2 ft high or have large prickles. So I don’t think he could help it, really, and he did put up a very nice fence for me, so I forgave him. If the alchemilla does not re-emerge by the end of April, I will have to consider it to be buried in an unmarked grave and go and beg a seedling off my friend Sharon. Or plant some pyracantha instead.

And finally, the Brimstone Butterfly Report. I saw one on 15 March. So far I haven’t seen any others.

Today I decided it was time to re-route the road to nowhere, leading from between my apple trees to the back hedge.

The Path to Nowhere

I thought a path between the apple trees would be useful for maintenance and would provide a route to the greenhouse and the vegetable bed behind it. However, I soon realised that it looked wrong because it appeared to just disappear off into the back hedge. Also, the area between the apple trees will get some sun, and I can’t waste any sunny bits of my garden. So I rerouted the path to run parallel to the edge of the lawn, and this will provide a dry route to the left hand corner of the garden, as well as allowing access to the apple trees and other plants in that area.

The path re-routed to run behind the apple trees.

I have ordered a little bundle of plants from J Parkers, but they say it can take 28 days for delivery, and I only ordered them 12 days ago. The plants were competitively priced. I am not worried if they turn out to be small, because small plants need less water. It is certain that we will have a hosepipe ban by the end of April, and it could be sooner. I need to get rid of some more plants in pots, either by composting them, planting them, or giving them away.

After some early morning fog, today has developed into a warm sunny day. But where are this year’s brimstone butterflies? I haven’t seen any yet.

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.

With the sudden change to dry and slightly warm weather, I have been spending a lot of time in the garden this week. I have finished breaking up the concrete foundation into manageable pieces. The chunks that I had before I did this were too heavy to lift safely, which was a nuisance. So I broke them up into two. Each chunk probably weighs about 5 – 7 kg, which is easily manageable. I now need to get all the fragments of concrete off the lawn so I can mow it without damaging the mower blade.

I also rearranged my pots. I had put some near the pond for the winter, thinking that I would get the landscaping works done in January, but I had to move them because the plants got their first feed on Monday morning, and it would have been very bad to have let the run-off from the fertiliser drip into the pond. I don’t think the newts would enjoy vine weevil killer either, which is what the plants can look forward to getting at the end of the month.

The current arrangement of tarpaulins

I saw my first brimstone butterfly on 10 April 2010, but not in my garden. It was fluttering above the junction of the A3 and the M25. I think that’s quite late in the year for a first sighting, but I am not surprised about this.

Today is the first day of spring because I saw a brimstone butterfly. I didn’t have my glasses on at the time, but it definitely was one. This gives me an excuse to use the picture that my friend Sharon kindly sent me last year.

Brimstone butterfly

I continued with my pond transfer, and unfortunately the news here wasn’t so good. When I tipped out my buckets of plants, newts, snails and pond water into the temporary pond, I found that several of the newts appeared to have died. I have no idea why. I wondered if I might have physically damaged them in getting them out of the pond, but they didn’t look injured. I have a small hope that the shock may have put them back into hibernation and perhaps they are not dead, just resting, but I think they are dead really. I put them into my current compost bin, which has only a small amount of plant matter in it, so they will be safe from predators if they do wake up, and can easily crawl out if they are so minded. And if they are dead then they can contribute to the garden lifecycle.

I was going to repot the plants, but I decided it was too cold to be messing about with pond water unnecessarily, so I put the ones that were already in baskets into the temporary pond, and I put the ones that had escaped from their baskets into ordinary plant pots and put them in the temporary pond too. I will try and do something with them in July or August. I think I will have to buy some more pond baskets – big ones. I may also buy a different water lily. The one I have is so vigorous it’s a liability.

I started to take up the path that runs along the straight edge of the old pond. This is quite an easy job as some of the slabs were already loose. I used a crowbar to lever some of them up, but some of them were so loose that I could just pick them up off the ground. I put the slabs around the edge of the temporary pond so they can hold down the edge of the liner and make the pond look slightly pretty. Under one of the slabs I found two newts fast asleep, but it must be spring; the brimstone butterfly says so. So I put them near the temporary pond so that they can wake up and get in it as soon as possible.

Today is definitely spring, because I just saw my first brimstone butterfly of the year. It is a big lime-green job, and I had forgotten its name, but I remembered it is usually the first butterfly to appear in spring. I typed “first butterfly” into Google, and found the name.

My pulmonaria is in full flower. It has lovely deep blue flowers, and it is right up there with vinca minor for ability to grow in the dark, so I want lots of it in my garden. I dug it up and divided it into seven pieces. I hope they all survive.

I gave the lesser celandines another dose of glyphosate. So far, none of them has flowered, so they are obviously taking some notice. I also dug up some more bulbs. I cannot believe how many of them I have in my garden. I don’t even know what they all are, but I definitely have too many of them. I think most of them are probably bluebells.