Helen's Garden Renovation Project

After our almost-record-breakingly hot March, we have had a chilly start to April. The early rhododendron and my magnolia have both gone brown. If the magnolia’s flowers were meant to be that colour, they would be quite pretty.

A frost-damaged magnolia flower

I have planted the Euonymus europaeus Red Cascade. The poor thing looks like a terrified sacrifice victim tied to a stake.

Euonymus europaeus Red Cascade

I have also planted the small bay tree. I am going to have to rearrange my black polythene compost bags to try and keep the weeds out as much as possible. Ultimately I need lots of ground cover plants, but while the shrubs are establishing I think they would appreciate not having the competition.

I repotted my three Callicarpa and the rhododendron into larger pots because they were getting too thirsty too quickly. I realised at this point that my blueberries, which are of four different varieties, do not have any identification on them. I think I could look them all up and place them in order of fruiting, and then decide from observations which is which. My dad thinks I should get a life.

I haven’t made any progress for a while because it keeps either being windy or being about to get windy. Today it was slightly windy, but I decided that I was fed up with not planting the magnolia and today I wanted to plant it. There is only one place in the garden where there might possibly be enough room for it, and so I put it there.

The magnolia and me

I really struggled to get the magnolia out of its pot. I used gravity by resting the pot on top of a pile of compost bags and pointing the plant at the ground; I used a trowel to dig around the inside of the pot; I even used a hammer and chisel to get a bit deeper than a trowel could go. I thought I would have to saw through the pot, which I didn’t want to do because it is a nice pot. Eventually, after losing quite a lot of soil from its roots and more than a few flower buds, the plant came out.

I have grave doubts about whether it is a good idea to plant a magnolia in such a restricted space, but I think it will be OK there for another five years at least. And although magnolias don’t like being pruned, it doesn’t seem to kill them. So I have made my decision, and we will see how the arrangement develops.

The promised rain didn’t really come to much, so I had a good week of gardening. It’s now the time of year when I need to spend a lot of time on maintenance, so progress has not been as fast as it is in early spring, but I have started work on dismantling the path. I have removed all the paving apart from one little triangle that is stuck fast to the foundation and refuses to come loose. (You can’t see the triangle in the picture because it is in the part of the path that has turned a corner).

The path with foundations exposed

And then I made a start on taking up the foundation. The mortar mix used to make the foundation has varied a lot among my different sections of path, and unfortunately, these foundations are very hard. The work is also made more difficult by the fact that the path is right against my neighbour’s fence, which means I have to be careful how I swing the pickaxe and also take care next to the fence posts. I have managed to remove only about an eighth of the foundation so far (the path turns a corner at the end, so there is more to do than is apparent from the picture). I tried drilling holes in the foundation using my power drill with hammer action, but that was very unsuccessful – after I had drilled a row of holes, the slab eventually cracked along a different line further up.

Then I wondered whether some acid might help to weaken the concrete – after all, it contains calcium compounds, which should like reacting with acid. I thought about pouring some vinegar on it, but then I decided toilet cleaner would be even better. The toilet cleaner is easily the most corrosive thing in my house – the limescale remover for the taps only has an X on it, but the toilet cleaner has a picture of drops burning a hole in someone’s hand. And it contains hydrochloric acid, and is thick and clingy so should stay on the concrete until it rains. So I made three lines of toilet cleaner. There was not much sign of a reaction – a mass of very small bubbles, but no audible fizzing. Perhaps it would be better to chisel out a groove and pour the toilet cleaner into that, then see if a crack develops if I bash it again after a day or so.

Path foundations with blue lines of toilet cleaner

Still, I have done an eighth of the path, and I should be able to get through it eventually – it will just take time, like the Leylandii.

This is my latest arrangement of the tarpaulin on the pond. I am hoping that it will prove to be completely waterproof, but I need to wait for some rain to find out. The pond builder has been round to look at the pond, but has not told me his verdict yet. Blagdon has not replied to my email. It said it might take 14 days to respond unless my email referred to critically ill fish, but even if I get a reply today, this is still appallingly slow customer service. I can’t find any reviews of Blagdon Pond Paint on the Internet, which is unusual. It would be reassuring to hear that someone has managed to successfully waterproof a pond without the paint coming off and making a black sludge.

Tarpaulin over pond

I have been distracting myself from the Pond Disaster by thinking about my planting plan for the left hand side of the garden. There is just about room for the apple trees at the centre back of the garden as long as I allow the canopies of the trees to overlap with the lawn. I am planning to move the trees in November, although my dad says I can move them any time I like as long as I water them well. An important advantage of moving them in November is that they will be lighter, especially as I can prune them after I have eaten the apples. I think there will be room for the magnolia at the far left hand corner. I am quite excited at the thought of this, as I had thought that the magnolia would have to stay in its pot for ever. I also hope to put in the buddleia and escallonia next to the fence, and the pieris in the damp patch behind the pond (it will be damp because that’s where the overflow empties) and irises near the shallow pond. My three cornuses are supposed to go where the magnolia is going, but I can put them in the right hand side of the garden, next to the third pond. I don’t see why not.

This morning I watered all my potted plants because it has been so dry and even quite hot. I scooped the water out of the shallow pond to use for watering, and that was when I noticed that the newts had moved in. Now it says quite explicitly in the Plan that the newts are to use the deep, raised pond and the shallow pond is for the frogs. To be fair, I haven’t put up the warning notices or the CCTV cameras yet, but something tells me that I am not going to be able to enforce my amphibian apartheid, and the newts are going to eat all the frogspawn every spring as usual.

Newt in frog pond

On the subject of gardening fails, my beautiful little hellbores that I planted from seeds from Chiltern Seeds have disappeared. There was a bit of slime in the pot, so I think that slugs or snails got them. I still have plenty of seeds left in the packet, but of course they may not germinate until next spring, which is a long time to wait. The instructions say that I should keep them at 0C for 6 weeks, so I put them in the fridge last time, but perhaps this time I will try the deep freeze in the hope that they will be tricked into germinating in the middle of summer. And I will protect them from the slugs and snails until they are big and strong.

However, the magnolia is not a fail. Oh no. And I really do not know which picture is the best so here are three of them.

Magnolia in full bloom view 1

Magnolia in full bloom view 2

Magnolia in full bloom view 3

It’s definitely time to start planting. The major job is to get the six big thuja into the ground instead of the Leylandii. I have now removed all but one of the Leylandii, and have partly dug up the remaining one. I took the following picture last week, when I made a lot of progress because I took the week off work and it didn’t rain.

The penultimate Leylandii comes down

The price for the lack of rain is that I have to water all my plants. I have been scooping out the water out of the shallow pond, which will all have to come out because I haven’t sealed the mortar yet, and the chemicals in the water might hurt the frogs. They probably won’t hurt the plants, though.

I was going to paint the pond last week, but I was still unsure about whether it was dry enough yet, as some more water got in and it had black pigment in it. I decided that digging up the Leylandii was more urgent, and it won’t do the pond any harm if it is left until June before it gets painted. So the tarpaulin stays on. You can see it in the foreground of the picture above. I have cut a triangular piece of tarpaulin and hemmed it to stop it fraying, so it is easy to put over the pond and keep in place.

Although the thuja planting is the biggest and most important job, planting some of the smaller plants is also worth doing because it reduces the amount of watering and feeding I have to do. I have removed all the rubble from the area near the camellia and have started on the underplanting. I am going to have some of: viola, primula, aquilegia, geranium sangineum, hellebore and probably honesty, if I recognise the emerging seedlings correctly.

Camellia underplanting

And finally, here is a preview of the magnolia. We may have some overnight frosts in the next few days, but if we don’t… oh wow!

Magnolia in bud

The magnolia in a pot still hasn’t died and is flowering again. It has only four flowers this year, but I am not complaining. I am just glad that it survived the hard winter.

One of four flowers from the magnolia growing in a pot

We have had an exceptionally long period without rain. I haven’t been able to do as much gardening as I would like because I have been busy with other things, but I have been keeping the pots weeded and well watered. They will get their late spring dose of vine weevil killer at the beginning of May. It will be lovely when I finally get the pond and lawn constructed and I can at last plant my potted plants in open ground, so they will need less feeding and no de-weevilling.

In my last post I said that it was difficult to find time to renovate the garden because the demand for tuition was building up. This is still true, but the garden has now decided that it’s time for Spring and is slowing my progress by producing weeds, especially dandelions and bittercress, and by growing (the grass is the main culprit here). All these things need attention, and that reduces the time available I have for the Garden Renovation Project. I have had to repot the Very Badly Taken pelargonium cuttings because they can’t go outside until the end of May. I have also decided to sow some tomatoes this year. My parents gave me some very large pots and I will put the tomatoes in them, which will reduce the need for weeding, and I’ll probably be able to get away with only watering them every two days, unless it is very hot, because the pots are so large.

In case anyone thought that the reason I haven’t mentioned the magnolia which I dug up and stuck in a pot is that it has died, it hasn’t. It hasn’t produced as many flowers as last year, but it’s made a jolly good effort and here it is.

Magnolia in pot with flowers

So, although I was out for two hours this morning, I didn’t make much progress with the tree stump. After the recent hot weather, it seems to have dried out a bit around the edges, so I sawed off a few slices. I am trying to dig it out but that’s quite a lot of work as well. I think that if I can dispose of it by the end of May, I will be doing well.

This morning I chopped off all the branches of the four Leylandii trees that I am replacing, apart from the ones right at the very top which I couldn’t reach.

The four Leylandii trees after I had removed almost all their branches

It was quite an easy job removing them. Most of them were thin enough to come off with my telescopic loppers, and I sawed through the rest using a hand saw. I didn’t use my Alligator Loppers because I want to practise a bit more before disobeying the instructions not to use them while standing on a ladder. The thing to do is to look up while you are cutting off the branch several feet above your head, and then look down, so the branch falls on the back of your head and neck rather than on your face. In fact, because the hedge is so thick and tangled, falling branches did not gather a lot of speed and therefore it wasn’t painful having them land on me. As Leylandii branches bring me out in a rash on contact it was a good thing not to have them touching my face.

When renewing a hedge on a boundary, it is a good idea to notify your neighbours first. If they like the hedge, they will be disappointed when they see it go, and if they don’t like it, they will be disappointed when the new one starts growing. Although it is a supposedly well-known fact that everyone hates Leylandii, my neighbours like the hedge for the same reason that I do – it gives them privacy. So I have warned them about what I am doing and therefore I hope they did not get too much of a shock seeing bits of my garden for the first time (the hedge was there when they moved in). I think I did quite well to drop only one branch into their garden – I retrieved it with a rake, so that my shredder will not be deprived.

I now need to decide whether I am going to remove the poles myself or get a tree surgeon to do the job. Although they look quite thin in the photograph, they are at least the size of an upper arm, and it can be quite hard work sawing through something of this size when it is vertical. It will also be a fair amount of work digging the stumps out, but I think I can manage this as long as I take my time about it. While I think about this, the next job is to shred all the remains. Stripping the trees took me about one and a half hours. I expect the shredding to take at least that.

The magnolia’s leaves are going brown. I hope this is because it thinks it is autumn, and not because it thinks it’s fed up with being in a pot. I did give it some plant food granules last week.

I keep reading that this summer is very wet, but after last summer, my idea of what a wet summer means has been radically recalibrated. Yes, it has rained a bit, but I have made a much better job of keeping on top of the weeds than I did last year, because I have sometimes had a chance to go out and pull them up. And I haven’t had to do much watering of pots or of the new planting in the communal areas outside my house, so I am not complaining. I have bought a Vulkan Tennis Elbow Brace from Amazon (is there anything they don’t sell?) and that has allowed me to carry on weeding and pruning in reasonable comfort.

Not only are the weeds being pulled up, but progress, although very slow, is being made. Here was my plan of February 2007:

(1) Get the air conditioning unit moved. DONE.

(2) Get the side passage paved over and remove posts in far corner where greenhouse will go. DONE

(3) Install water butts. DONE.

(4) Buy and assemble tool store. DONE apart from needing a shelf.

(5) Put tools in tool store and tidy up garage. NOT DONE YET.

(6) Order greenhouse and get it installed. NOT DONE YET.

I can now refine the plan as follows (the tasks do not necessarily have to be executed in the given order):

(1) Remove the four Leylandii trees at the right-hand end of the hedge and replace with Thuja plicata. This is part of my plan to renew the whole hedge in three stages.

(2) Work out where greenhouse is going to go.

(3) Tidy up garage to make room for greenhouse. This may involve getting another tool store and putting a shelf in the existing tool store.

(4) Order greenhouse.

(5) Dig trench for cable.

(6) Get quote for work to lay base for greenhouse, put it up and wire it up to the mains.

(7) Get work done.

Today I trimmed some branches off the Leylandii that are going to get dug up, and worked out where the greenhouse is supposed to go. To avoid copyright problems, I have redrawn the part of the plan that deals with the right-hand back corner of the garden and here it is:

I stuck four bamboo canes into the ground at the corners of the square enclosing the octagonal greenhouse, where the four pairs of dotted lines meet in the plan. Here are two photographs. The first is taken looking towards the back fence, at a slight angle so you can see behind the bay tree (the big green shrub at the right of the picture).

Greenhouse location looking towards the back fence

And this one is taken looking from the side.

Greenhouse location from side

You may not be able to see it from these photographs, but there is a slight hitch in the plan. The bay tree is growing where the arch is supposed to go. The greenhouse cannot go any closer to the back fence because I need access to the compost bin in the corner, and because there needs to be access to the hedge to keep it trimmed. I have been thinking about my options.

(1) Murder the bay tree and put the greenhouse and arch where the plan says.

(2) Keep the bay tree and move the greenhouse further away from the side wall so there is room for the arch.

(3) Keep the bay tree and don’t move the greenhouse, but put the arch somewhere else, or don’t have it.

I don’t want to move the greenhouse, as that will reduce the space I have for growing vegetables and will result in wasted space between the fence and the greenhouse where nothing will grow. So I have to decide whether I want an arch or a bay tree next to the greenhouse. The bay tree is one of the few mature shrubs still remaining in the garden, and I am inclined to leave it where it is, and then see how it looks next to the greenhouse. On the other hand, if I am definitely going to get rid of it, it would be a lot easier to dig it up before digging the trench for the cable. And it is rather big. Although I definitely want a bay tree (I use its leaves in cooking) I could manage perfectly well with a smaller one grown in a pot or restricted space. I don’t actually have to murder it: I could cut it right back and prune its roots and stick it in a pot, just like the magnolia (which still seems perfectly happy – see the first of the two photographs in this post) or I could dig up one of the small offshoots near its base and plant that in a pot instead. One thing is for sure – despite my guilt at dispatching a healthy and beautiful plant, it will be heaven to chop it up, with that gorgeous aromatic scent from its leaves.

Here is a picture of the magnolia soulangeana that I cruelly dug up and viciously pruned last year. Doesn’t it look really fed up?

A gardening expert has kindly told me that magnolias hate being pruned and stuck in pots, and that the reason it is flowering is that it is just about to give up the ghost and that it hopes that if it has lots of children someone will be nicer to them than I was. Sadly, I realise this may be true. So I am making sure that I look at it lots of times in case this is the last spring it ever sees.

My tool store arrived just under two weeks ago, but I haven’t assembled it yet because the instructions say that it wants to be painted at least once and preferably twice with decorative wood finish before it is put together. I might have done that this morning, except that it rained heavily from about half past five until about midday. I shall have to wait for a clear day so it has a chance to dry after being painted. I think I shall probably also have to buy some more wood paint.