Helen's Garden Renovation Project

Yesterday it rained and rained and rained. It then stopped raining, but the garden was very soggy, so no work could take place. Unfortunately, it then rained in the evening and overnight. But first thing this morning there was no rain, and the forecast is for a settled few days ahead, so the works began.

This is the plan for the works, correct as of Tuesday 18 January, 0800 hours.

Plan of garden works

The big diagonal rectangle is the lawn, and the triangle cutting into it is the raised pond. The area at the bottom of the diagram is the patio.

First, my landscaping company measured out a right-angled isosceles triangle for the pond, and dug it out. They had to put in a couple of drainage channels because it was so boggy.

The area for the pond has been dug out

Then they filled it with a dry base to soak up some of the water, and then poured in some nice concrete.

Concrete base for raised pond

And then we worked out what to do about the patio reshaping. The patio had curves, and these needed to be made into straight lines so that they matched the rest of the plan. Yvonne, the garden designer, had made all the straight lines parallel to or perpendicular to the house. But Mike (from the landscaping company) suggested using diagonal lines to help draw the eye along the diagonal lawn and thus enhancing the illusion of length. We played around with bits from the raspberry frame (what a good thing it was that I didn’t get rid of the 10-foot cross pieces) and eventually came to a decision. And this is what it looks like.

Patio reshaping progress

This picture is taken looking towards the right of the patio, so the house was on my right and the new pond was on my left when I took it. One corner of the lawn will fit into the cut-out triangle – this is what we had in the original plan. But instead of joining the triangle to an edge that runs parallel to the house, it is now joined to an edge that runs parallel to the new lawn. At each far side of the patio there will be a rectangle cut out that will frame an evergreen plant: the camellia on the right (as you look from the house) and the elaeagnus on the left. I like this new arrangement because it is simple and doesn’t have any what Mike called pinch points; i.e. there aren’t any bits where the patio gets too narrow as you walk from the right side of the garden to the pond.

So I would say this has been a very good start to this stage of the project. It is definitely best not to be too rigid about a plan, but to discuss it with the people doing the work. They may even be more knowledgeable than garden designers because they always see the results of the plan and can tell (even if they don’t say) whether it is any good or not.

We had the coldest December since Decembers were invented. I did a little bit of tidying up occasionally, but I couldn’t do much because my fingers would freeze, even with gardening gloves. In contrast, January has turned out to be very warm, with temperatures of as much as 11C sometimes.

But never mind about that. The important thing is that building work starts tomorrow, weather and other circumstances permitting. So yesterday I went out and cleared the patio, pushing the trees and shrubs back towards the house to allow as much room as possible. I also cleared up a lot of leaves and made another attempt to scrub some of the green slime off the patio. (I did this a few days ago because the patio was so slippery it was getting really dangerous).

Clear patio ready for reshaping

And today I went out and brushed the remaining leaves off the tarpaulins. I folded two of them up and put them in the greenhouse so they would be out of the way. I folded most of the third one up and left in in place in front of the back fence. You can see there are still quite a lot of weeds, even though I have pulled a lot of them up already. I pulled up the weeds that were along the line where the lawn edging will be laid, to stop them getting everywhere.

The garden without the tarpaulins - view 1

This view shows a bit more of the area to be landscaped, but the perspective is a bit funny.

The garden without the tarpaulins - view 2

This is going to be a good test of the cat repellers. Although I haven’t seen many cats in my garden, they have managed to foul the earth under the newly planted thujas. Most of the rest of the garden has been useless to them because it has been covered up. The garden is now a gigantic potential cat toilet, and I hope that the cat repellers manage to keep the cats off it.

It is very exciting to think that I am at last getting the main part of the work done. It’s a bit scary too. It’s not just the expense – it’s the fact that if I hate it, it would be very expensive to undo. And I cannot tell whether I am going to like it until it’s done. On the other hand, it does have the advantage of being a garden. So if I think it looks awful, I can just fill it up with very tall trees and then I won’t be able to see any of it.

The UK has been having a big freeze, which started about a week ago. Scotland and the East got most of the weather, but we got some snow overnight on Wednesday to Thursday. It had already been too cold for comfortable gardening, and now it has got even colder. As I write this, at just gone half past ten in the morning, it’s minus 3.2 degrees outside. I wish the garden contractor I asked for a quotation would hurry up with it – it’s not as if he can be doing any landscaping in this weather.

I know I have lots of pictures of snow in my garden, but I decided to take these two anyway, from my kitchen window.

View from my kitchen window 1

View from my kitchen window 2

I haven’t written anything recently because all I have been doing is to get rid of dead leaves (lots) and weeds (a few). I have now got a quotation for the work, but it’s a lot of money so I have decided to get a second quote to make sure that I am getting the best value.

This morning it was 0 degrees (that’s 32 F if you are American or old) according to my handy digital weather station, but I went out anyway and re-did the chalk lines using a slab of tailor’s chalk that I bought from a local haberdashery shop. This was much better than the chalk pencil because it didn’t break. I explained to the shop owner that I wanted to draw on the patio with it, but didn’t explain why, so he may have thought I was a bit loopy. I used my photographs to remind me where the lines were, and I think I have got it pretty much right. I noticed some fine white particles on the tarpaulin and wondered which tree they had come from, until I realised that of course it was the first snow of the winter. There was not much of it, but it was still snow.

The pelargoniums are not dead yet. I dug up one of my osteospermums because the clump still hasn’t recovered to its original size after the ravages of last winter, and if we have another severe winter I may lose the lot. I have taken the plant indoors and put it in my nice warm sitting room.

I cleared up some more leaves and then went in because my fingers and toes were hurting too much. This time next year I shall do the sensible thing. I shall not draw on the patio and I shall only attempt to do any gardening if the temperature is at least 6 degrees.

I have had a busy week and not much time for gardening, but today I attached some wire netting to the fence.

Netting placed in front of damaged fence panel

I realise this is probably the most boring picture in the whole blog, but I do like to have pictures in my writing, since there is not much conversation to be had with plants. The netting is very tough, and I have attached it with screw-eyes and wire to the fence panels either side (that way, I don’t have to screw in more eyes when the fence panel is replaced). It is possible that the foxes will damage another fence panel to get in and out of the garden, but I hope that they will jump on top of the compost bins and make their exit that way, thus not causing any damage.

After I had drawn my chalk lines, it rained, quite heavily. All the Tesco chalk was washed away, but the lines made with my tailor’s chalk remain. It must be different chalk.

The weather has got a lot colder – it was below zero at eight o’clock this morning – but still very dry. I got fed up with my dressmaker’s pencil because it kept breaking, so I bought a box of 10 sticks of chalk from Tesco for 45p. They break too, but not into such tiny bits. I have been drawing lines on the patio to work out where it should be cut. I think I have nearly decided what should be done.

This is where the bottom left hand corner of the lawn will extend into the patio.

The line going through the right-angle of the triangle is just a construction line and not to be cut through. I will rub it out before my landscapers start up their angle grinder.

This is where the patio will be cut to make the right hand border

A mystery has been solved. The hole in my fence, which I first noticed in January 2009 (see Fence damage), was almost certainly made by a fox. I saw a couple of foxes yesterday, running backwards and forwards across the back of my garden, and one of them dived through the hole into next door’s garden. I am going to have the panel replaced when I get the pond and lawn edging built, but I think it would be a good idea if I put some netting across the panel now to try and discourage the foxes from using that route. Otherwise they may just make a hole in the new fence panel. Ultimately I am going to grow some pyracantha up the panel, but that will take a few years.

My pelargoniums don’t seem to have noticed this morning’s frost. I am quite happy for them to continue in blissful ignorance. In September I took cuttings as usual, but only three. I didn’t take them as badly as I usually do, and they seem to have all survived so far.

We are now having a dry spell, so I have had a couple of long stints in the garden. Yesterday I moved most of the plants off the patio and tarpaulin. Some are standing around the pond.

Plants around the pond

Some are standing around the greenhouse.

Plants by greenhouse

Some are standing on the old path by the side fence.

Plants by side fence

And there is now hardly anything left on the patio.

Hardly anything left on the patio

The plants in front are the pelargoniums, which I will keep until the first frost. The other plants are six thuja, the buddleia, the magnolia, the pieris, and the largest of my rhododendrons. They would be very heavy to move elsewhere, and I think they can be slid out of the way when the works start.

So that was what I did yesterday. Today I did some more surveying. I checked the measurements I made this time last year, and was pleasantly surprised to find that they weren’t bad. Last year I used a large folding 45 degree triangle. This year I used Pythagoras and the Cosine Rule. The triangle obviously did a good job. I also used masking tape on the patio. I am not sure whether this was a good idea or not, so I also used a dressmaker’s pencil which I bought from Allders for 75p before it went bust. I started working out where the pond was going to go. The plan says the pond has to be most of a 3m square, which I thought was scarily big, so I thought about having a 2.5m square instead. But when I marked out the pond using the raspberry frame struts which I had saved in case they came in useful, and reminded myself that the walls have to be 30cm thick so that they can be sat on, 3m didn’t seem so out of proportion after all. And I will have big shrubs near it, like the eleagnus and rhododendron. I will put my measurements into my carefully drawn plan on graph paper using Excel, and see how it looks there. And if it wants to rain tomorrow, that’s fine – I am too stiff and achey from all that plant and tape measure moving to be up to any more practical work at the moment.

Where the pond will go

We had lots and lots of rain but now it’s time for a dry spell, so I finished off planting the hedge.

The second row of four thuja plicata, all planted

I am now much better at planting big trees than I was last week. It was still hard work, but much less effort than last time. Yesterday I planted one tree in the morning, and the other two in the afternoon. I gave them a bag of compost each, and borrowed some soil from elsewhere to fill the hole. It is now apparent that I am going to need a lot of soil to get the level back up in this area. I need to take it from some area of the garden that isn’t relevant to the next phase of the work.

The Hedge Part 1 has grown well.

The first four thuja that I planted two years ago

As you can see, both hedges are just beginning to reach beyond the top of the fence. I found it strange that the trees kept in pots should grow just as fast as the trees planted in open ground. However, the trees in the pots are not yet pot-bound, so perhaps the restriction of the roots hasn’t had any effect yet. Also, the trees in pots probably got more light than the ones behind the greenhouse, which are hemmed in by the fences and the bay tree. And the trees in pots may have got more water, although I was careful to water the hedge whenever it was hot and dry for a few days at a time. I fed the trees in pots more than the hedge too.

These thoughts about the growth rate are not just of academic interest; I have to decide what to do about the middle section of the hedge. Although I would like to let the replacement trees grow a little bigger before I remove the middle four Leylandii, I am afraid I will not be able to plant them if they are 7 ft tall. I am thinking that the best thing to do would be to remove the Leylandii in March and then plant the six replacement thuja as soon as the ground is warm enough, before they have had a chance to grow any more.

I also now have to face my miscalculation about the number of thuja needed. You can see from the picture below that there is a big gap between the left-hand edge of the hedge and the blue conifer.

 The heavy rain and winds have not been good for my sedums. Poor things.

My sedums after being rained on a lot

Yesterday it rained.  A lot. Tomorrow it is forecast to rain again. A lot. So today I mowed the lawn and tried to plant the new hedge. I had to do a bit more digging first, but then I was ready to put the first tree in place. Then it started raining. I almost gave up, but then it stopped raining and the sky turned an innocent blue, so I went back to tree planting.

I found out that planting a tree of that size is non-trivial. It is so heavy, for a start! Then it has to be at the right distance from the other trees, the right distance from the fence, and the right level, vertically speaking. I tried to plant it in the orientation that would make the trunk look straightest. And it was jolly hard work. My legs were turning to jelly by the time I had finished. I stuck some bamboo canes around the tree to give it some gentle support, put my muddy spirit level away, and went indoors and wiped the mud off my tape measure. I was interested to see that the newly planted tree looks about as big as the four that I planted two years ago. I had thought that the trees in pots would grow more slowly than those in the ground, but I hadn’t measured the heights to check this. Maybe the extra food that the potted trees got made up for not having so much room to spread their roots about. This implies that it could be worth feeding the planted trees, in the summer at least.

The fifth thuja has just been planted.

And I still have nine more of these to plant! I need six thuja to go in place of the four remaining Leylandii, so I will plant three more this time. Then I will see how it looks and maybe plant more, and buy some more thuja to finish off the hedge next year. I really should have remembered that I was planting the thuja two feet apart when I bought them. If I were doing this project again, I would not grow the trees so big before planting them. I would perhaps buy small ones and grow them on for a year or two, but I wouldn’t let them get to five feet high before planting them.

At least I can have a nice rest tomorrow while the rain waters my tree for me.

The weather is noticeably cooler and the days are equally noticeably shorter. I fed my plants a few days ago. I may make that the last feed of the season, or they may get another one at the end of September. I have been starting to tidy up now that growth has slowed down. If I am lucky my garden will look tidy for about a month, and then the leaves and the beech nuts will start to come down in force.

I have removed the second tree completely, and a nice tree surgeon came round to trim the hedges. I trimmed back some of the jungle at the left hand edge of the garden as well.

Preparation for the second instalment of the new hedge

You may notice that the number of the plants on the blue tarpaulin has decreased significantly. This is not because they have all died, but because I have started to move them out of the way of the planned works.

Space made for winter storage of plants

The plants are now sitting between the bay tree and the greenhouse. I have started to dig up some turf, which I shall bury somewhere that won’t be dug up imminently so it can rot down. I have put some of the path foundation blocks on the bare earth and I will use this space to store more plants. The essential thing is to get them out of the way when the landscapers are busy building the pond and cutting up the patio. And it’s looking as if I may just about be able to do it, given that the plants need less growth space in winter.

The next job will be to plant the thuja in the gap between the four remaining Leylandii and the blue conifer. I will dig in plenty of compost. The first set of four thuja that I planted two years ago are now almost level with the top of the fence.