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.

3 May 2009

It’s amazing what there is to see when you look closely

You can click any of the photos to see a larger version.

My very modest postage stamp of a garden has been a great joy to me since we developed it from scratch. It has filled out and developed over the years into a haven of peace – the place I reward myself with time when I reach some deadline or the end of an especially tricky piece of work. I potter and tinker as I eat my lunch and work outside on every day the weather makes it possible.

I laughingly call it my ‘courtyard garden’. In reality, it started life as a typical yard to a Lancashire cottage – a walled patch of concrete, originally to house the outside facilities – and in more recent times, the bins.

There is a tale attached to the layout of our house and outside areas, which are pretty much back to front. It would be normal practice for houses to face the street and have their back yards on the side of the house furthest from the street, but our house is one of a collection of cottages, all slightly different, that housed the workers of the adjacent mill. Mine, the largest and end of a short row, is reputed to be the mill manager’s cottage. My yard and back door are on the street side and my ‘front’ door on what is the gable end.

When they were built, the owner of ‘our’ mill was in some sort of feud with the owner of an adjacent mill, who owned a very large domestic property of some status (in recent times it has been a nursing home) along from the row of mill workers’ cottages. In order to cause him maximum offence, our mill owner built the properties back to front, to ensure that the outside facilities and less attractive aspect of the houses faced the road, so that as his rival drove past to his large luxurious home in his carriage, he had to pass the back of the workers’ homes, offending his sensibilities.

Our cottage is a long thin stone built property of about 140 years old now. So the yard is long and thin too. We have our proper garden on the other side of the house, but the layout doesn’t make it as suitable to occupy, so I leave that as my bird garden – one to be viewed from inside and enjoyed through windows and my courtyard garden is the one we spend time in. Being fully walled it gives us more privacy and is a sheltered sun trap that has allowed it to thrive.

Due to unfortunate domestic circumstances, I’m not going to be able to spend any money on summer planting this year, or at least only the barest minimum. So I decided today to make the best of what we already have.

I’ve always kept a lot of evergreen plants and perennial greenery to supplement annual flowers, which ensures that it looks good and has interest all year. Which will come into its own this season when I can’t do so much summer planting. So we moved things around to fill gaps and re-potted things and gave it a good tidy and I was pretty happy with the results.

It’s at that exciting time when everything is waking up after winter and even supposedly ‘green’ shrubs develop little flowers and new growth races away. I took some photos – most of these below are of very small areas of growth, tiny little flowers at the end of shoots – some only a few millimeters in diameter. This is why I love taking photos of little things – you get to see detail that you just don’t see with the naked eye.

I was astonished to see that this little flower at the end of a growing shoot actually has striped petals on the back – why does nature bother to give it this detail?