August
I am sure we all have bits of our garden that we really struggle with and to be honest turn a blind eye to. I also bet that those areas are ones which are possibly in difficult to get to parts of the garden, or have difficult growing conditions. My challenging spot is the top right hand corner, as you look from the house; it’s the corner behind the workshop. As you can see from the photo above the corner suffers from the shade cast by my neighbour’s trees mainly the Elder which is right in the corner. This has two large conifers, probably leylandii behind it which form part of the hedge along my neighbour’s back boundary.
But having battled with the elder for years I was thrilled the other evening to get a visit from my neighbor asking if I minded them cutting back some of the branches on the maple to the front of the shed. During the conversation she mentioned that the tree surgeons would be cutting down the elder and the two conifers. I felt a little bad later at how enthusiastic my reaction was; maybe saying ‘Oh good, I really struggle with that tree..’ is a little selfish! I was thrilled when I got home on Friday, just before the light faded, to see the transformation. Not only had the tree surgeons done a very neat job with no debris on my side of the fence but the amount of light that is now flooding in on that side of the garden is amazing. It isn’t only the light but the fact that the elder, in full leaf, created such a rain shadow at the top of the garden that I have struggled to grow anything. As you can see there are three bamboos along the back fence. The one to the left of the picture above is much taller than the others, in fact the third one has hardly put on any growth since it was planted some years ago and I am really hoping that with the increase in light and moisture the plant will start to thrive. I am now revisit what plants I can use to plant around the bamboos and maybe I can now consider something more exciting than is presently there.