It is ages since I posted an End of Month View post. I have been hosting this meme for something like 10 years and I think that I just ran out of steam. But now I have started to post again I thought I would post an EOMV post and as I haven't posted much for ages I thought I would give you a tour of the garden - front and back. You can access a plan of the back garden here
So we are starting in the front garden. I have quite a deep front garden and a couple of years back I decided to get rid of the front lawn as it was just boring. I put a path in purely for decorative purposes and to allow some access for me to manage the plants. The driveway runs parallel to this area, and the photo is from the top of the driveway. The planting has filled out a lot over the last few years. There are a lot of asters and grasses in the area to the left of the path, which is much deeper than the photo implies. I am now working through removing most of the asters as I want interest throughout the year not just in late summer. I have this last weekend added the Anemanthele lessoniana to the border, which has been relocated from the back garden.
This is a rather boring photo of the front of the house but I am super pleased with the new path that went in last year. I'm also really pleased with the narrow border under one of the front windows. It has been a difficult border for years, due to the builders rubble but the various succulents seem to thrive here; so I'm going to do the same on the other side of the front door.
So we go along the lovely new path and down the side of the house, past my son's wood store and you come to the back patio and my random pile of pots and compost. But this photo does show you the difference in the height between the patio and the back garden.
Here is my patio, not the most glamorous of patios but it does the job. Lots of seedlings in pots to be sorted, the majority of these are peony seedlings from a couple of years ago; turns out I'm quite adept at germinating peonies.
A warts and all view of the other end of the patio. The area to the left used to be the fern border. However, the ferns were deteriorating as the rosemary was shading them out. The ferns were moved about a year ago and I decided to remove the border and continue the paving to make this area bigger and more practical. However, life got in the way and I haven't yet completed shifting the soil.
You go up the steps at the end of the patio and you find the bark path to your left. The border to the left is the rose border. I have accumulated a number of roses here over the years and the border is backed by 3 step-over apple trees which I have trained from whips. I started off with just roses and herbs but the other week I have added a few plants from the Big Border (to the right) including some Agapanthus divisions.
The border to the right is the Big Border that is going to be home to my edibles, see last post.
If you continue straight up from the steps you come to the grass path on your left and this goes across the top of the Big Border. The grass isn't in very good condition at the moment and is covered in soil from my work clearing the border. I built the retaining wall to the right of the path this time last year and it has worked well. It has reduced the slope of the border and the plants seem to just look better. I also like the structure it gives.
View from the other end of the grass path - not a great photo but it gives a sense of the slope of the garden.
From the grass path you can see the back slope of the garden, which is quite steep. If you look at the garden plan on the blog you will see that there used to be a path along the top of the slope. I have got rid of this over the last couple of years as it served no purpose. Instead I have more planting space and I have been moving shrubs in along the top of the slope to create some shrubby cover.
And this is the far top corner, which I call Maisie's Corner as my beloved cat is buried here. The compost bins were here until a couple of years ago and we removed them as they were a nightmare to manage. Instead I have a large shady spot and have moved a number of the ferns from the patio border here, along with some shrubs which had outgrown their homes. We buried Maisie here as it was one of her favourite places and I still find it hard to garden here as I miss her so much.
So there's my garden warts and all at the end of a reasonably wet March. Given that we are self-isolating now for a while I hope to be able to get out and start to sort it out more. However, the reality is that my work is very demanding and I'm finding myself stuck in front of a laptop every day but at least I get to sit in the garden for lunch on a sunny day which is a definite improvement on the normal working week.
