Helen's Garden Renovation Project

This morning it was again a little less cold – above freezing again at 1C. There was a little drizzle when I went to get the papers, and the roads were damp as if it had been drizzling overnight. The sunrise was a bit red, but I hoped that it didn’t mean it. Fortunately the rain had stopped by the time it got light, at about eight o’clock, and later on there was even sunshine.

This picture shows where the project got to yesterday, in better lighting.

The shallow pond, shaped and reinforced with concrete

The first job was to build up the inner wall of the pond. There was also plenty of grouting to be done.

Raised pond with most of the inner wall built up

I’d asked the landscaping company to replace two damaged fence panels while they were at it. This is not really Renovation but Maintenance, but had to be done. The fence is made of slotted concrete posts, so in theory, old panels can be slotted out and new panels slotted in, but this only works if the surrounding plants have not pushed out the posts. Mike had to attach a spare batten to make the fence panel stay where it was put, and it was not possible to move down the concrete gravelboard on the panel opposite because the fence was so overgrown with ivy (from the other side). Another annoying thing is that fence panels now come in a different size. WHY DO THEY HAVE TO DO THIS? Still, I am not really bothered because the most important thing is for the fence to be stable and functional, and it is.

The next thing was to lay the pond liner for the shallow pond. This was not easy because of its shape. A layer of sand was laid, and then a few bits of spare liner were put over the sand to provide some extra cushioning. The liner at the long straight edge was slotted into the wall of the raised pond, just above the engineering bricks. This was done by chiselling out the mortar. To hold the liner in place while re-mortaring, you shove in bits of cardboard. Mike said the liner was held in by small bits of stone shoved into the joint – mortar alone wouldn’t have held it.

Then the coping was laid on the top of the raised pond. Note there are two very sharp corners. I shall have to watch those and if I get too many bruises, I’ll have to grow some very soft plants around them.

The raised pond with the coping finished

Here is a picture of the entire construction.

The whole construction at 3 p.m. on the fourth day

About an hour after this picture was taken, I looked out of the window and wondered what was supposed to happen with the left hand edge of the shallow pond, as you look from the house, so I got the plan out, and realised to my horror that the edging had taken a wrong turning! The problem was at the right hand edge of the raised pond – instead of coming in at right angles to the patio, it was supposed to turn off and meet the patio at 45 degrees. I rushed out and said those dreaded words, “I’m sorry, but I think you’ve done it wrong.” Fortunately, it was quick to put it right. We decided to keep the edging that was running along the entire length of the right hand side of the raised pond since it made the triangle isosceles. We could have kept the line as it was, but I thought the lawn would look odd – instead of being a rectangle with a triangle cut out of it, it would be a rectangle with a triangle cut out of it and another triangle added onto it. The triangular bed that the three edges have made is very small, but I have decided which plant will go in there. It will be the dwarf rhododendron that my neighbours Nick and Mel kindly gave me when Dave died. It will flower at about the time of his death every year, if it keeps good time, and it will be right next to the pond, which is exactly where Dave would have spent the most time if he had lived to see the completion of my garden.

The light has gone, and so have the landscapers. They will be back tomorrow for a bit of finishing up, but now the covers are on the newly concreted and mortared structures, and it’s time for a rest. You might think that I have no right to feel tired, and I would agree with you, but at the start of this I really didn’t know whether I would love or hate the implemented design, and it has been such a long time in the planning. Richard said, before starting the project, that it would look amazing. I don’t know whether he says that to everybody, but on this occasion he was right. It does look amazing.

It was not as cold this morning as yesterday morning: just above freezing at 0.2C. Today the main job was to get the liner and marginal shelf put in the raised pond. The method was to put the liner in first, and then build up the inside of the pond with blocks, odd bits of rubble and concrete. This means that very little liner will show at the end.

Richard chiselled out a hollow in the middle of the pond, making the maximum depth about 60 cm. This is to provide some protection for the inhabitants against extreme cold. I am not currently planning to put any fish in the pond, but I may do so later. Then he put in the liner. Then it started raining, despite the fact that it had been told not to do this by the Met Office. This is why my photograph has a tarpaulin over the pond.

The pond liner is put in place - just as it starts raining

Richard then started on the marginal shelf, which I had estimated needed to be 20 cm below the water surface. But I realised I hadn’t checked this, and I put a probe into the temporary pond to see how deep its shelf was, which I think is about the right height. It was about 24 – 27 cm. So the marginal shelf needed to be deeper, especially allowing for the fact that the water level will not always be at its maximum. I can always put pots on bricks if they are too low down, but can’t do anything about it if they are too high up. So we managed to do a slight change of plan, which will make the marginal shelf about 27 cm below the surface, which will do nicely.

Marginal shelf in raised pond

The edging for the lawn is now almost complete. As I expected, it had to be raised quite a bit above ground level at the back, but this was mainly because there was a big dip in that area. There will need to be a slight slope down towards the back fence, but nothing too dramatic. The main thing was to get the lawn flat as I don’t think it would have looked nearly as nice if it had been sloping.

In my final photograph, taken as the light was fading, you can see the shallow, ground-level pond has now been dug out. It’s difficult to see the depth from the photograph, but the deepest area is right next to the diagonal of the raised pond. There is a gentle slope from this flat, deep area, leading to the edge in all directions. Plants can be stood on the deepest area. Using Pythagoras, I was able to calculate that each of the three short sides needed to be 1.76 cm to make them all the same length. This worked on the ground as well as on paper. In this picture you may also be able to see that the soil from the shallow pond has been put to good use building up the ground level around the lawn edging.

The shallow pond has been dug out

Richard and Mike think that I should not dig over the lawn, because the rubble in it provides good drainage. Maybe that is true, but I may dig it over anyway because I don’t think it’s in very good health, whatever the reason. But for now I will put my tarpaulins over the soil and mow the existing grass as normal, because it’s more important to work on the rest of the garden first. I am already formulating a plan in my head, which I shall write in this blog, and then totally ignore, as usual.

This morning was a frosty one. It was -1.3C when I went to get the papers, and it took a while to get above freezing. Fortunately the concrete base was not bovvered. A layer of engineering bricks, which are unexciting apart from the fact that they have holes in them, was laid first. There is probably a really good reason for doing this. The tops of the bricks are level with the surface of the patio, so they won’t be seen when the earth is put back.

A row of engineering bricks to start the pond off

The walling blocks for the pond took a while to arrive. Kebur, our local supplier, was very busy today because the sun came out yesterday so lots of people wanted to do things to their gardens. This is what the pond looked like when it was about half built.

Three courses of the pond

Meanwhile, the edging for the lawn has been progressing.

New patio edging and the start of the lawn edging

At the end of the day, Richard had laid six courses of bricks and Mike had got to the end of the right-hand long side of the lawn edging, but I couldn’t take any pictures because they wrapped it up in cloths and tarpaulins to keep it all nice and warm through the night. One of my blue tarpaulins came in useful because there was such a lot to cover.

Already I can see that the illusion is working. I am not sure how well it will work when looking out through a window, but when you come round the corner after walking down the side passage, you just have to look along the length of the lawn, and the garden really does look longer. Squaring off the edging of the patio really works well. Although I loved the curves, the straight lines look just right with all the rest of the design. I am beginning to think about how I will do the planting. There are bound to be too many plants for the space available, but I can put them in their pots in the places where I think they should go and see how that works. I can hardly wait.

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