Helen's Garden Renovation Project

I have acquired a frog from Bourne Buildings, and installed it next to Dave’s rhododendron. The frog seems a bit on the large side compared with the rhododendron, so maybe I will not keep the frog there permanently, but this is where it lives for now.

Frog next to Dave's rhodendron

It is time to announce the results of the Willowherb Elimination Stakes 2011. For new spectators, this sport consists of me trying to pull up all the willowherb before it sets seed. Once again, the willowherb gets the trophy.

Willowherb successfully producing seeds

At this time of year there is not much time for Renovation because everything grows so fast it is as much as I can do to keep up with the weeding, pruning and lawn mowing. My apple trees are both heavily laden. And my hibiscuses are just getting going with the flowering. This one is next to the conifer in the corner. I am going to move it, but I don’t know where yet.

Hibiscus grown from seed

And this is my hibiscus Blue Bird, which lives in a pot at the moment. Again, I am going to have to think of somewhere to put it.

Hibiscus Blue Bird

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%.

As usual, there has been little rain this week. I chipped out the excess mortar around the edge of the rectangular cut-out at the left hand edge of the patio, and planted the elaeagnus x ebbingei and a few other things around the edge.

Elaeagnus, primulas and pulmonaria

I planted three pink pulmonaria because I think they are suffering a bit in the dry weather and would prefer to be in the ground rather than pots. I have decided that I will not plan the planting of perennials too rigorously because they can be easily dug up and moved later. The important thing is to get the shrubs in the right place. I planted the elaeagnus exactly in the middle of the space and I also planted it level with the edging. I wasn’t sure whether I should plant it slightly lower, but I decided that once it is established it will not want to be sitting in a puddle of water when we get the floods again. The primulas and pulmonaria will hold the soil in place and stop it washing off onto the patio.

That got rid of seven pots. Then I planted some more primulas and an aquilegia under the camellia. That got rid of five more pots.

Camellia with underplanting

The plant reduction is getting more important because I am going to have to use the area that will eventually be the new lawn for earth mining, to fill in the trench left by the path removal, for a start. That means the plants sitting in that area will have to go somewhere else. When I do the apple tree moving and the shrub planting in the late autumn, I will order a large number of bags of compost to mix in with the earth. And then I will see how much more earth I need.

The kalmia latifolia’s flowers have opened, so they no longer look like iced gems. But they still look jolly nice.

Kalmia in full flower

And when I went to see the pyracantha to check whether any of the netting needed rolling up, out of its way, I found that it had turned white. I know it is meant to do this, but I was still impressed.

Pyracantha in full bloom

Number of pots = 114. Percentage reduction 21.4%. That’s getting more like it.

Look, no more path. All gone.

Path foundations all gone

Not only have I removed all the foundations, but I have broken them up into easily liftable chunks and piled them up neatly out of the way.

Path foundations stacked up ready to go to the tip

The reasons for my success are (1) much of the path foundation was much softer than the part I was trying to break up at first and (2) I changed my strategy after reading about how to break up concrete on the Internet. My old strategy was to chip out a line across the block and keep going until it cracked along that line. This produced nice neat cuboid-shaped blocks, but was very slow when tackling hard foundation. I found that if I bashed the edge (the edge furthest from the fence, obviously) then often the foundation would crack after only a few blows. This did not usually produce nice shaped blocks, but I didn’t care by then. When it came to breaking up the large chunks into smaller ones, I piled the blocks on top of each other, about three high. This made it easier to bash them with the pickaxe, and also meant that the vibrations couldn’t be absorbed by the soft, uniform soil. Sometimes, I managed to break up the blocks underneath the one I was trying to break, which obviously saved effort.

I now need to fill the space left by the path with soil from elsewhere, and I can plant things in the little rectangle at the left hand side of the patio. I will do that next week, weather permitting.

It rained on Wednesday night, for a change, and on Thursday morning it seemed a good time to turf the hole left by the reshaping of the patio.

Gap in lawn very badly turfed over

I dug up some strips of turf from another area of the garden and turfed the space very badly. It does not need to be done well because in spring 2012 (plus slippage) I will dig up the turf and reseed the lawn. I just want it to be mowable until then.

With all the work I am doing, it is easy to forget to look at the plants, some of which are putting on a really good display.

Peony in bloom

In the temporary pond, the iris has been flowering for a week or two now.

Iris laevigata 'Midnight'

And if I had known how beautiful the kalmia was, I would have got one a long time ago. Its flowers look like iced gems (without the biscuit).

Kalmia with iced gem flowers

The weather has stayed dry, although there was a tiny bit of rain overnight, and a slight sprinkling this morning. I have carried on taking up the path. I had a very unproductive session on Monday – the toilet cleaner didn’t seem to have done any good at all. I didn’t even manage to take up an eighth of the path before I became too tired to carry on.

So this morning I thought I would carve out a few grooves at the other end of the path and keep filling them with toilet cleaner in the hope that several applications might help weaken the concrete even if one application seemed to have no effect. And then I had some luck. The foundation at the far end of the path is much weaker than that at the near end. I managed to break up more than a quarter of the path in one session, which means I am now halfway through. In the picture below you can see which bits I have done because I have put small paving slabs against the fence where the foundation is missing. This is to deter foxes and badgers which might otherwise feel tempted to burrow underneath and possibly damage the fence panels.

Path removal progress

I also did some planting. I planted my three pelargoniums among the baby thuja. This doesn’t count as pot removal because until a week ago I was keeping the pelargoniums indoors.

Pelargoniums among the baby thuja

I planted some persicaria which I dug up from the communal shrubbery next to my house. The persicaria has done very well in that location and was getting overgrown, so needed thinning out. Honest. I checked the levels while I was at it – the spirit level in the picture is resting on the corner of the lawn edging. The ground slopes down to the back of the fence, so the conifers are lower than the soil level will be next to the lawn edging. I planted the persicaria at a height that was in between the height of the base of the fence and the height of the edging. It is the sort of plant that could help hold a slope together, so I am hoping that it likes its new location. That means three pots have gone.

Persicaria and sprit level by the back fence

I checked the levels at the left hand side of the garden too. Again, the ground slopes down towards the fence. I estimate there is a height difference of about 5 cm. This should not be too bad to deal with, but will need some thought when I lay the stepping stones.

Number of pots = 126. Percentage reduction so far = 13.1%

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.