I am sure you have heard of Auricula Theatres well in my garden there is a Succulent Theatre.
This was never the intention when my son constructed this staging for me. Last Spring I was fed up with this particular bit of the garden. It is at the end of the patio and is an area of gravel just before my neighbours fence. I have tried in the past to dig into it but not surprisingly it is full of builders rubble and subsoil – my patio is about 5ft below the rest of the garden due to the slope we are on.
In addition this part of the patio has a tendency to flood when we have a lot of rain although in the last two years the flooding has reduced and I can only assume this is because someone has cleared a storm drain or some such thing somewhere.
Anyway, my eldest put together some scaffolding board and breeze blocks and hey presto a staging area. It has been a real boon. I use it in winter for pots of bulbs that I am waiting to plant out, in spring from seedlings hardening off or waiting for new homes and in the summer to give my tender succulents a nice airy home.
I just need to sort out covering the fence and it will be sorted. The only way to grow something up the fence is in a pot which is tucked into the corner of the boards. There was a passion-flower but it was killed off by the winter in 2009, last year there was Dicentra Scandens but again the winter got the better of it. Now I have a Clematis in the pot which I grew some seed and which survived -19 in a pot last winter so I am hopeful we might have cracked it.
It is also a very useful place to store my spare terracotta pots!
