Not-quite-the-end of the month view: September

Well, heck, I'm only a week late for the End of Month View (hosted, some time ago now, by Helen, aka The Patient Gardener). And who can blame me for clinging onto September: it has been a remarkably warm and balmy one. And it's looking pretty dicey for October, so if it's all the same to you I'll linger for a while longer in the twilight zone between summer and autumn.


It's not, however, been an altogether sunny picture in my garden: particularly my front garden. You see we've had an amusing time this summer almost completely rebuilding our house.


A relatively straightforward project, to replace the blown cement render with lovely stone-house-friendly lime render, turned into something altogether more fundamental when we discovered that the cement render was actually holding the outer wall in place.

The whole process has involved large holes appearing here and there (and I mean large: we could stand up in the one in the end wall), the rebuilding of the entire end wall plus a chimney stack and the reinstatement of the top of the wall at the front, which turned out not to be there any more.

And most upsettingly for the garden, it also meant we've had scaffolding right round the house since around July. The builders were commendably sensitive and didn't plonk scaffolding poles onto prize plants: but there is lime on everything, and because I haven't been able to access the area the bit of progress I had been making has gone backwards.



So this winter's project (one of them: the fruit cage is also going in this winter, but that's another story) is to get this little lot back in order again.


First job is to remove the more rampant plants here. There's a self-sown cotoneaster bent on taking my stone wall down with it, and a large stump that needs to come out.


Also getting seriously out of control are some more welcome plants: a fine clump of small-flowered asters, a species I think though I haven't yet been able to identify them with any sort of confidence. There are masses of white Anemone japonica 'Honorine Jobert'; the snow-in-summer (Cerastium tomentosum) has galloped gaily over everything; and there's tons of self-seeded valerian in every nook and cranny, too.

Some of these I shall just move; the valerian will go (there's plenty elsewhere in the garden; I do love it, but not to the exclusion of everything else). And I'm afraid the Cerastium is just a bit too bedding for me; it's going.

There is a dilemma, in the shape of a large and stately hardy fuchsia in the middle of the whole thing. It's massive; it's in the wrong place; but it's a fine plant. I can't see I'll be able to move it without wrecking it wholesale; my preferred option at the moment is to take some cuttings and start again, with the statutory mourning period required for the sad but necessary passing of such beauties.

And replacing it all? Well: part of it is already assigned. I have my corner of scented geraniums, underplanted with blankets of Strawberry 'Baron von Solemacher'. I have an olive tree to replace the horrible cotoneaster in the corner, to arch gracefully and elegantly over the semi-oval of chamomile lawn which will replace the scraggy grass and even scraggier roses which inexplicably occupy the only flat bit. And the thyme collection dotted around another side is coming on nicely.


And once the other planting areas are cleared and as I want them, I have herbs dancing through my dreams: medicinal echinacea and stately angelica, prostrate rosemary dripping over the old stone wall and hummocks of sage ringed with dancing spheres of silvery-pink chive flowers.

I have a yen to grow mandragora root, liquorice and blood-red veined sorrel, fenugreek and cumin, capers and orach, mint (sunk in pots) of every shape, size and flavour, vervain for tea and sweet cicely for sweetening my rhubarb.

In fact I'm sure I'll run out of space long before I've run out of herbs I want to grow. At the moment, I'm just thinking how different what I see out my window looks in comparison to the vision I have in my head: but then gardens are the stuff that dreams are made on. And besides, the scaffolding came down this week. Time to get out the spade and turn those dreams into reality...

Garden makeover #2: Going round in circles

What with there not really being much going on in the plant department, I thought I'd get on with some of the revamping project. This time it was the turn of my tatty and scruffy little front garden.

This is quite a neat shape, in that it's almost a perfect square, and it has the spectacular advantage of a big mature winter-flowering cherry (Prunus x subhirtella 'Autumnalis') in the middle (one of my most-prized plants). But it's always been a bit of a pain - we have a nominally gravel drive which wasn't very well laid by the previous occupants of the house, and the rather odd layout meant there was a whole awkward wasted corner of it which was getting progressively colonised by weeds.

Anyway, so I've spent much of the weekend digging up the drive and laying out a mildly funky new design I came up with at college the other week.

Trouble is it involves two concentric circles - all very cool and all that, but it suddenly occurred to me I'd never actually tried to lay out a circle on the ground before.

Well, there's a first time for everything - so this is what I did:

First, find your centre point: I drew this all out on graph paper to scale first, which may seem fiddly but it's very worth the extra time as drawing with a ruler on paper is a whole lot easier than drawing on the ground, especially if you have to rub it out a lot. That's a long bit of string looped loosely around the cane, knotted at the outer edge of the circle - a bit Heath Robinson, but it works.


I discovered that they don't sell those nifty but probably highly un-environmentally sound marking-out sprays in garden centres, so I had a go at the old-fashioned sand-and-drinks-bottle method with a bit of sand I found behind the shed. You basically fill a drinks bottle with the stuff (a lot more difficult than it seems), upend it and hold it upside down at the end of the string with sand pouring out in a steady stream while you mark out a circle. Sounds great in theory, doesn't it? Well - I think a) the sand needs to be very dry, unlike this stuff, which was nearly frozen and full of old leaves, and b) you need to have a funnel or something to get the sand in the bottle as otherwise you end up with half of it all over the kitchen floor. Like I did.


Then the sand ran out (I didn't tell you this was going to turn into a bit of a saga) and I discovered a whole new scale of messiness. House ash, from our fire and kicking around waiting to be chucked out, turns out to show up a lot better against gravel, and pours easier, too. But oh my goodness, I was covered with the stuff by the end of it.


Anyway - many hours of happy messing around later and this was the result. You can see what I mean about the weedy patch...

Final stage - a lot more straightforward, just dig a trench along the line of the sand/ash and sink log-roll edging into it so that the circles are permanently marked out. This, I hasten to add, is not the finished result: the eventual idea is that the logrolls will be hidden under some nifty low box hedges and there will be some truly lovely planting (including a few little surprises) filling the gaps between them.

It may not be award-winning garden design, but it's pepped up my front garden no end, and it only took a couple of days. Can't wait to plant it up now!

Recycled lavatories

The other week at my ever-challenging and interesting plant design course at Capel Manor, we got to talking about environmentally-friendly gardening.

Now, I'll nail my colours to the mast here and say I'm not entirely organic - I've been known to spray bindweed with glyphosate when nobody's looking, and my most heinous crime is to Pathclear my patio and driveway every year which I will no doubt have to account for in the afterlife. However - five minutes of talking to my very knowledgeable classmates has made me realise there's rather more to it than that.

We were talking about gravel. I've got loads of the stuff here - on my driveway, on the patio, and under my cold frame. It's cheap and easy as pie to use, I buy big jiffy bags of the stuff every few years or so to top things up, and until now I'd thought that was a relatively neutral material, insofar as I'd thought about it at all: the RHS promotes it as a good alternative in its "don't pave your front driveways" campaign, after all, doesn't it?

Not so. Marine-dredged gravel is the worst of all: "harvested" by something akin to Spanish trawlers only much, much more devastating. They suck everything up off the seabed to a depth of a couple of metres, killing all marine life that happens to be in their way, then they clean, grade and sort the gravel and spit back into the sea what isn't needed. Incidentally smothering all marine life that happens to have wandered into the area in the meantime.

So - you avoid that like the plague, and source it as land-dredged gravel, right? Well - if you can get companies to specify where they get their gravel from - this is certainly better. But the amount of fuel it takes to suck the stuff out of the ground, sort, grade and then transport it where it's needed requires a few aircraft-longhaul equivalents of carbon a throw.

This was all getting me in a real gloom. I was already having a conscience about using paving to hard-landscape the area around my shed and greenhouse (the garden makeover is proceeding apace, of which more later). It's not just the (itself not very eco-friendly) paving: it's also the sand and the cement-based hardcore I don't like having to use. Now it turns out the so-called 'better' options like gravel actually aren't.

The 'green' alternatives to gravel - bark chips, recycled tyres or bright blue recycled glass bits - are either too hippy or too horrible to contemplate. Or they wouldn't last five minutes. And then I discovered the wonderful world of recycled aggregates.

This is basically some of our rubbish that would have gone into landfill but is instead crushed down and sold back to us as gravel-like surfaces for pathways and hard standing. Surprisingly, for what might seem like an obvious idea, it seems to be a bit new, so there aren't that many people doing it yet. Long Rake Spar, in the Peak District, does a gravel made of crushed building materials that looks pretty good (and very like regular gravel), but the one I really like the sound of is sold as Traxmax. It's ceramics, either tiles or bathroom suites (I wonder if it's sometimes avocado-coloured?) taken out of the local tip, hopefully cleaned up a bit, smashed up into little bits and delivered in a big bag. The best thing about it is that because the original ceramic was made of clay, once it's broken up it becomes a little sticky again - so when you put it down on your path and it rains, it bonds to itself and becomes a solid surface.

You get it from this company - the only supplier I could find - and it's not even very expensive. There may be a catch: but I'm going to give it a go and I'll let you know what it's like. And anyway, I kind of like the idea of walking over second-hand loos on my way down the garden.

Garden makeover: Shedding about #2

Guess what I spent my weekend doing...

After my little bit of inspiration over the twin evils of a shed in the wrong place and a nasty little problem spot, there was no point hanging around really so I got out the tools and got to work.

First job - dig the whole area out to a spade's depth (getting rid of all that borage in the process) and put down a nice clean layer of weed suppressing membrane. Lo - the problem area is no more.

Next, after those nice people at Wickes delivered a load of building materials, it was barrowing a couple of inches of hardcore (actually the same stuff road builders use so it can't be bad).



That was the (relatively) easy bit done - then I had another couple of inches of sand on top of that:



...and the tricky bit was getting the horribly heavy paving slabs down. These were recycled from the paving slabs that were alongside the shed already, which seemed like a good idea until I realised how damned heavy they were. They were the kind you use for pavements - great for settling down and not moving anywhere without a small bomb beneath them, awful if you do actually want to move them somewhere. I did my best - it wasn't quite patio standard, but it was OK for a shed base, and looked pretty good by the time I'd finished.



Then the fun bit - ta-da! One minute the shed was over there - the next, it was over here!



The tarp is because we managed to tear the (already gently rotting) roofing felt while we were moving it, but no matter, we have another roll in the shed which we'll finish it off with next week.

I'm dead proud that we got it all done - but don't be deceived by the "before and after" pics above: this was a long, sweaty, difficult job, especially the moving-the-shed bit which involved a lot of swearing and entailed dismantling the entire building and reconstructing it over a period of several hours. However - it's also a job well done: we discovered a rat's nest underneath where the shed used to be, since they hadn't gone to all this trouble and had just put the shed on fence posts laid on the ground. Ain't no rats can get through this lot, I guarantee...!

Garden makeover: Shedding about

This is my shed.

Yeah, yeah, I know, well we can't all have quirky interesting sheds. I've actually got another shed too, up at the allotment, which is both quirky and interesting so maybe it'll find its way onto these pages before long just to prove this is Not My Style (honest).

Anyway. I inherited the shed with the garden, and as I was wittering on about recently, there were a lot of eccentric design decisions made by my predecessor in this garden - one of them being to place this shed plumb in the middle of the main view from the house. So when you look out of my kitchen window you see my lovely plants set against a gorgeous background of poo-brown shiplap.

Next bit. This is my Problem Area.

It's actually right opposite the shed, a little further down, and all I can do with it is hack it back periodically as nothing will grow there. It's under the deep shade of an overhanging cobnut tree (one of the more lovely aspects of my garden) and is a jungle of nettles, next door's self-seeded pink buddleia and rampant borage. You quite often see this deceptively pretty plant sold both as plants and seed in garden centres, at which I invariably laugh hollowly and totter out weakly since I've been waging a running battle with it for nearly 7 years - mind you I'm winning... mwah ha ha ha....

Mmm. Well. Anyway. I have for quite a long time been eyeing the shed... then eyeing the Problem Spot... then eyeing the shed again... It's an obvious solution. So today I started digging. You can just about see the fork (about to root out those bloody borage roots again) and the stakes marking out the spot in the picture above. It's going to be a horrible job (the pic of the shed very wisely doesn't include one of its contents - I don't think I've seen the back wall since we moved in) but the results will be Step One in the great garden makeover. Wish me luck.

Garden makeover #1

There's only one problem with my garden - I don't like it very much.

I don't mean the plants (I lurve them) but the layout. I inherited it from the previous owner, who was a special needs teacher with many, many special needs of his own - totally barmy and it's entirely reflected in the lunatic way he's laid out the garden. I got rid of most of the crazy plants he put in as soon as we moved in (I mean, who plants Rhododendron ponticum in their garden?!). Mustn't be too scathing though as he did pass on my much-beloved Lonicera xylosteum.

However - though it's easy enough to rip out plants and replace them, doing the same thing with the basic layout is one of those huge tasks that makes you want to just go back to sleep.

Well, now that I'm emerging, blinking, into the light having spent eight years in Very Small Child Country, I'm feeling just about strong enough to take on the challenge of a makeover. What's more, I brought a client back to my house the other day and she didn't believe it was mine because it was so unkempt... well that was embarrassing. So I really, really have to do something about it now.

When I say makeover, of course, I'm not talking Ground Force. More like a slow, meandering, several-years-long process of improvements, at the end of which I hope I shall have a garden which better reflects what I think a garden ought to be.