4 Jul 2009

My garden may be small . . .

. . . but it’s a source of great joy to me. I sit out in it at all times of year – I have thermal mats and insulated coffee cups especially so that I can enjoy it in winter too.

I have one particularly spectacular hosta this year, bought as an end of season bargain last year in a sorry state. This has half a dozen lovely flower spikes – although it’s a shame they don’t last longer. Click the photo for a larger view.

Our house is a stone cottage of about 140 years old. It was the managers house for the adjacent mill, originally a calico printers. It’s a rather unusual looking house – long and thin and tall and thin. It has a very steep pitched roof and the upstairs of the house is already within the slope of the roof area, the top floor is completely within roof space. The rooms are all tall and the windows set low. It’s almost as if after designing and building the outside, they decided to put one less floor in to save money (it has 4 if you count the cellar), so re-distributed those they were building – leading to windows at shin level upstairs.

An overall view of the garden, divided into two areas; the closer section as a more utility area, where we keep the bins, hang washing out and I do my gardening work and the farther seating garden. It’s the nearest thing I have to a dining room.
Please click any of the photos for a larger view.

We have two small gardens. The house sits in a vaguely square plot, which has been divided into three long thin rectangles – two long thin gardens sandwiching a long thin house. The garden I am referring to is actually the back garden – and as the house is in fact back to front, this puts it on the street side of the house.

Just inside the trellis dividers in the dining area. The black ceramic figurine on the left is my alter ego Boo. I saw her in the garden centre and joked that she looked to have been modelled on me. She came to live with us that Christmas. 😉

For a number of years after moving here, we used it as originally intended – minus the outside facilities – as a place for the bins, hanging out washing and for some years, a substantial run for 3 rabbits we had. It was a large expanse of poor quality concrete and some ugly stone and brick exterior walls. I grew a few plants in pots, but as time passed, we wanted a proper garden – an exterior room to eat in and sit out in. So we saved up some money for a complete make over and started drawing sketches.


I never did take any ‘before’ photos, but I have taken photos each year as it has developed. The greenery is now significantly more substantial than it started, gradually expanding and developing into a proper garden as the years passed – it must be about 8 years since we started the work.

Everything is grown in pots – the original concrete base is still there, but was of such poor quality, we bought a great pile of small grade decorative gravel and just covered it. The colour has faded over the years and there’s a lot of moss growing on it now, but it has withstood wear better than we expected. Because everything is grown in a pot, we can largely move the smaller things round, but the down side is that some plants don’t do as well as they would in open ground, so we probably don’t get as many years from a plant. But if you pay five pounds for a plant and you enjoy it for 2 years, you can’t really complain at the value it represents.

Each season I have a particular favourite area – where the planting works especially well, or things grow nicely. This year this is my favourite spot – around one of the stone seats we built from rescued slabs in the cellar and a large stone pear – another Christmas present.

The intention was always to have it as an outdoor room, so there are several seats and places to perch – I think the ones I am most pleased with are two substantial stone slabs we’ve set on blocks as seats and a way to give some height to the planting. These were both in the cellar, we think originally as work benches, if the wear marks on the undersides are any guide. So they cost us very little, but a great deal of sweat and effort getting them from the cellar to their current positions – which needed to be chosen very carefully, they’re not something you could move a few inches easily if you weren’t sure you liked where they were!
2 Jul 2009

The best thing about summer . . .

. . . when we get one that is, is getting out in the garden and using it as an extension of the house.

The hot weather lately has made me thankful that I work from home, the house is relatively cool as we don’t get much sun direct into rooms and the thick stone walls of our old cottage ensure that the house stays relatively cool.

I love being able to work with the door to the garden open and my habit is to perch on a bench by the back door frequently during the day as I work, as it remains in shade until about 3pm and is right in the path of any breeze we get.

Please click any of the photos for a larger view.

The hot weather has brought the garden on in leaps and bounds in the last couple of weeks and going outside to peg some washing out just now, I was surprised at how much difference there was since yesterday morning. I’ve been watching the progress of some fuchsia buds about to open – a week ago they appeared as little cream/green bulges and they fattened and the colour developed as the days have passed. When I watered the garden last night, they were still all buds and this morning, several have already opened.

Please click on the photos for a better view – they look rather dark and fuzzy here on the page.

My favourite fruit is raspberries, so having a very limited garden, all of which is grown in pots, I have treated myself to a few pots of canes – in fact the very first one was a Christmas present from my husband – at which time, it was a black plastic bag of earth with a few sticks protruding.

They haven’t done so well over the last two summers and I cut a lot of them down to nothing and bought new ones too. I think perhaps that was more to do with the quality of the weather than the quality of the plants as they’ve thrived this year and as you can see, the fruit is plentiful and large.

I wonder how long those will last in the fridge today?

I am also trying growing tomatoes this year – two varieties – to see how they do. I have a decent showing of flowers and now some green tomatoes of various sizes;


A friend visited a couple of summers ago on a nice day and I suggested we take our drinks in the garden. His comment; “I knew you said you had a small garden, but I didn’t think it was this small!” It always irritates me when gardening programmes offer ideas for small gardens and modest budgets, both of which are usually substantially bigger than my own understanding of small.

Despite our circumstances not allowing us to spend much on the garden this year and the plans to develop one end of it to be scrapped for now, I think we made the tiny budget (£25 – not the £15K that Chelsea designated a modest budget for a garden) give quite a good showing by making the best of what we had and planting new things carefully in between.

Some of my favourite things didn’t even cost money. In the photograph above, there is a piece of driftwood. We found that recently propped against a wall in our favourite car park alongside Thirlmere in the Lake District. By it’s smoothness, it has been bobbing about in the lake for a while and someone either retrieved it for themselves but subsequently decided not to take it, or a it had been thrown for a dog. But we decided if they didn’t want it, we’d give it a home. I have lots of such pieces of driftwood in the garden – I love the lovely sculpture mother nature gives us to enjoy.

12 Jun 2009

Some things are worth the sacrifice

This morning we had to leave at daybreak to make a trip down to Essex for an early business appointment. I say ‘we’ – the appointment was my husband’s – I was just tagging along to keep him company on what was likely to be a lengthy and tedious round trip.

We had to leave at 04:00am to make it in time and the sky was just starting to lighten and the birds were winding themselves into a full musical greeting of the dawn. It’s a glorious sound and one that never troubles me – it’s something to be enjoyed and rejoiced.

Click the photo for a larger view.

As the light levels grew, it was evident that it was going to be a gorgeous morning. The sky was almost completely clear and the air cool. I really do love early mornings, they always feel like the best bit of the day on days like this. It was incredibly tedious to have to set the alarm that early, but well worth it when you get to enjoy the day coming to life in that way, even from a car on the motorway.

Click the photo for a larger view.

There was a heavy mist from each body of water we passed, spilling over the fields as it dissipated and the light went from blue to golden within an hour and I snatched a few photos from the car window on my compact camera.

Click the photo for a larger view.

I hadn’t thought much of having to rise that early, but it really did prove worth it, it was a delightful start to a day.

8 Jun 2009

This is just taking liberties!

Last night I saw the most amazing and amusing thing in the garden. I planted a few chrysanthemums last weekend, a lovely deep red colour and noticed a few days ago that one plant had been reduced to a green stump by my garden snails – totally beyond help.

My lovely deep red chrysanthemums before the snails found them.
Click for a larger view.

Yesterday, another plant looked to be heading towards the same fate. I’d bought some extra copper wire to put round my pots, as they’re not supposed to tolerate walking over it.

I’d seen the likely culprit hiding behind a nearby pot earlier and had touched his foot with the copper and he really hadn’t liked it, so I was hoping it might be a kinder way to protect my plants.

So I made a ring round the half eaten plant’s pot and another around the plant itself and went out at dusk last night to see if it had done any good.

Not only was the blasted snail actually balancing on the copper ring to get a good position to munch away my plant, but the bugger was giving his mate a piggy back for a good chomping position too.

Click the photo for a larger view.

I’ve never seen team work like this before. I’m glad I got something to show you as it was going dark and the shutter speed is so slow that they’re not as sharp as they could be. Cheeky blighters!

Click the photo for a larger view. You can actually see the cheeky beggar balancing on the copper wire at the bottom.