Helen's Garden Renovation Project

The three readers of my blog will have noticed that there have been no entries for nearly a month. This is partly because I have been away on holiday but mainly because it simply will not stop raining. The damp weather started at the beginning of April – just after the hosepipe ban came into force. The hosepipe ban was lifted over a week ago, which we hoped would stop the rain, but no.

However, there is some hope that there may be some dry weather next week. When that happens, there will be a lot of maintenance tasks to do. The Willowherb Elimination Stakes are still in progress. And I do hope that one day I will be able to mend my shallow pond.

In the meantime, here is a colour combination that simply would not occur to an average garden designer.

Crocosmia with Lychnis

I planted the Crocosmia Lucifer deliberately. The Lychnis just turned up, as it always does, and I hadn’t the heart to pull it up.

Here is a Lychnis flower holding up its face against the rain. Brave little thing.

Lychnis in the rain

The wisteria is once again becoming wisterical.

The wisteria going wisterical, as usual

So I pruned it.

Wisteria less wisterical than before

I know what the books say about pruning wisteria – you have to do it twice a year, in July/August and January, and you have to cut x amount off each soft traily bit leaving y leaves still on there, and then it flowers. These instructions are clearly written by people without burglar alarm boxes and drainpipes. The only pruning instruction that my wisteria understands is, “Cut off as much as you can without falling off the ladder”. I am still waiting for the part of the process where it flowers.

A kind friend said that in the recent Willowherb Elimination Stakes he was rooting for the willowherb, describing it as “attractive and the way the seeds unpeel is nice (and it is, of course, free and very low maintenance)”. Low maintenance is a good way of describing a plant that needs no encouragement. Maybe next year the willowherb and I will have come to an arrangement where we can live together in harmony.

Another kind friend warned me that I had a demon in the Temporary Pond. I had noticed it had been getting somewhat overgrown, but I am used to having to pull out great handfuls of the pondweed from time to time.

Overgrown pond with pontederia cordata (nice plant) in flower

She identified my demon as Crassula helmskii, aka New Zealand Pygmyweed. The RHS and other highly respected organisations have terrible things to say about it, mainly because it is an invasive non-native species. I have no idea whether this is the pondweed I originally bought in 1996 or whether it hitched a lift into my pond and took over from what I intended to have. However, in a small pond it requires little maintenance – just five minutes a month in the peak growing season to rip out a few handfuls and compost them after leaving them by the side of the pond for a few days for things to crawl out. And it IS a good oxygenator, and the pond has always been very healthy with the weed in it.

Crassula helmsii or New Zealand Pygmyweed

So I am not going to attempt to eradicate the demon, but I may consider using a different type of pondweed if I ever get the two official ponds up and running.

I have been engaged in the pleasurable but demanding task of eating all the Discovery apples before they go off – they do not store well. I don’t know what they are like when cooked, but it seems a waste to cook them when they taste so divine raw. After I’ve finished with them, I have Charles Ross to contend with. It is a shame that both my apple trees have chosen odd years to bear their maximum fruit load, but perhaps when I move them, one of them will be upset enough to start producing in even years.

And finally… I notice that WordPress is now inserting pictures where I want them, instead of automatically putting them at the beginning of the article and expecting me to cut and paste them. I do not know whether this is because I have a new version of WordPress or because I sacked Internet Explorer 9 (it’s unbelievably slow and crashes even more often than Internet Explorer 8, which is saying something) and installed Google Chrome.

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%.

We’ve had a few weeks of almost uninterrupted sunshine. I can’t remember when we last had a sunnier spring and summer. I have been falling in love with my Hebe, which is covered in blue-purple flowers. It’s a bit noisy, with all the humming going on from all the bees visiting it, but very beautiful.

Hebe in full flower

In fact, the whole of the side border at the front of the house is maturing very nicely. The Trachelospermum jasminoides (that’s the great leafy thing in the foreground) is just coming into flower, as is the non-dead Jasminum officinale (behind the Hebe). The foxes haven’t dug up the pulmonaria recently, and there is getting less and less room for weeds. All good. The magenta flowers at the end belong to some lychnis, which self seeds itself in different places every year – I even saw some in a neighbour’s front garden a few houses along the road. I think it prefers sun, so it made a bad choice growing at the end of the passageway, but it seems to be making the best of its situation.

The side border at the front of the garden

As the wet weather continues, perfectly synchronised to my available days, I have realised that no more progress is likely to be made until September. I still need to cut the grass, pull up the weeds, feed the plants and clear up after the cats, and there is hardly any time left after doing these maintenance tasks.

However, sometimes I realise that a planned task doesn’t need to be done just yet. For example, I was thinking that I had better prune my hibiscus, which I grew from seed about 13 years ago, and which is partly blocking the path to my house. (The photograph is taken from the side; the house behind the shrub is my neighbour’s). The tree to the left of the hibiscus is the Magnolia Grandiflora that I also grew from seed about 13 years ago.

This hibiscus needs pruning - but not just yet

Then one of my few clients over the summer made some admiring comments, and I realised that pruning the hibiscus now was a pretty stupid idea. I will wait until it finishes flowering.

The deadline for my preparatory work before calling the landscapers in is the beginning of December. If August is a wipe-out, that still leaves me with three months to do the work, and at that time of year there should be less maintenance work needed. So it’s not a lost cause yet. At work this week I had my appraisal, and despite the fact that my manager has read some of my blog, she still set me some objectives, in the apparent belief that I would get them done. So at least she still has faith in me.

I have been receiving some rather odd spam comments in the past couple of weeks. They are all from random-looking usernames, such as qjoowtuh, rrgmecvum and zxabxdare. The comments themselves are like the usernames, and they point to web addresses that don’t exist, like http://ccfzjldvbfjz.com. (It is not a good idea to put a spammer’s web address into your browser to find out whether it exists or not, but you can visit http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/ and type the address into their box, which as far as I know is a perfectly safe way of finding whether a site exists or not). When I get a spam comment, I normally add the IP to my blocked list, but these all come from different IPs, which makes me think they are faked or belong to PCs in a botnet. What really gets me about this spam is that I can’t see what the purpose of it is. If anyone has any ideas about what the spammers are trying to do, I would be interested to hear them.

And finally, one of my water butts has sprung a leak. At first I thought it must be coming from the tap, but when I looked closer I saw that there was a very small crack in the plastic quite near the bottom. The water will be under high pressure there most of the time, and I am wondering what I can do about it. I might be able to paint some kind of sealant on it. I will have a look in B&Q.

While I was digging the border along the fence at the front of the house, I thought of another maths problem for any gardeners who are not spending absolutely every minute they have making up for a lost summer.

Six gardeners dig a hole 36ft long by 1ft wide and 1ft deep in two hours. How long does it take four gardeners to dig the same hole?

This morning I dug up the magnolia soulangeana in the back garden and stuck it in a pot. I had to cut four or five roots with a diameter of one inch. I also pruned out one of its three stems in the hope that this will give it a better chance over the coming hot summer. I have no idea whether it will survive, but I will water it every two days and hope for the best. It left a big hole behind. I put some of the poor quality soil that came from the side passage when it was paved over into the bottom of the hole but I haven’t filled up the rest yet. I will have to check the plan to see exactly where the hole is in relation to the greenhouse base. If it will be underneath the greenhouse there is no point in putting good soil into it.

I have finished firming and raking the soil in the front garden. I added some 6X fertiliser to the top layer, and sieved the top inch or so of soil, so it looks lovely. The grass seed packet says I should wait four or five days after adding fertiliser before sowing the seed, so I think Friday will be a good day for doing that.

I also need to get on with my tool store. Taylor’s Garden Buildings haven’t given me a quote yet so I will have to send them a reminder. There is also another website I will investigate: Titan Garden Buildings, who are based in Guildford, not far from me.

Today, after all the recent rain, we had a brilliantly sunny and even slightly warm morning. I eagerly got out my spade and trowel, but after digging up the winter jasmine, I found myself wondering what to do. I am waiting for a week or two before sowing my annuals, and in the far end of the right hand border, I am waiting for the many bulbs in there to flower before I decide which ones to keep when I dig them up, and I am also waiting for the lesser celandines to die after squirting them with glyphosate. (I have almost run out of it – must go to Wilkinson’s for some more). I am waiting for the side path to be laid before I work out where I want the toolstores and how big I want them to be, and in the front, along the side of the path that was laid last year, I am waiting for the soil to dry out a bit so I can continue digging over the soil and removing rubble in preparation for planting some climbers.

So I decided to cut back the osteospermum in the front garden, and dig up any layered shoots for propagation. One of the plants has done a bud. It’s not really supposed to flower yet, but this winter some people’s osteospermums never stopped flowering. I also removed as much of my neighbour’s ivy as I could from my fence. In future I am going to keep on top of ivy removal and am not going to let it get out of control again.

The front garden could do with some redesign and renovation, but I can’t take that on at the same time as the back garden. Also there are some problems that need sorting out, the main one being that I don’t own all the land that makes up the patch of land that I see as my front garden. The builders planted some not very good shrubs there ten years ago, and also a cherry tree that may not be in the best of health. I am going to watch it carefully this year and see if it is still alive. I am planning to dig up the shrubs that are definitely on my land and sow grass seed over the area. This will make maintenance easy – no pruning and no weeding, just mowing – until I have finished renovating the back garden and can start on the front.