Updates on the latest “experiments” and developments in the garden.
December 2021
The winter sun highlights the Cotoneaster leaves on the trellis – giving them an almost ‘red leather’ look. Leaf colour can be an important part of the garden in winter so is worth considering when selecting plants.
The main herbaceous bed in the garden is usually pruned back and tidied up in December, although we do leave a bit of growth and stems for shelter and protection for insects. As our winters are often very wet we find that any stems and leaves left turn slimy and will often start to rot potentially causing damage to the plants. The Verbena has since been protected with a covering of horticultural fleece to give it some added protection in the event if cold and frosty weather.
This winter we have decided to refresh the areas around the Prunus ‘Kanzan’ which we refer to as the “woodland area”. This has been partly prompted by a neighbour building a garden room which we can look into from our garden and partly due to the Choisya ternate becoming overgrown and completely blocking any view of the Azaleas from the house. The added bonus will be that we will be able to reclaim a seating area which we have largely lost use of – which ideal for catching the summer evening sun (if/when it shines!).
While the two photos do not fully match you will see how much impact cutting back the Choisya has had on this area of the garden. Choisya is one of those plants that should be able to cope with very hard running. There are already a couple of buds at the base of the plant and we will wait and see how this regrows next year.
We are also planning to increase the height of the trellis at the back of the garden to provide a little more privacy for both ourselves and our neighbours and are planning to install a pergola over the seating area.
January 2023
Well, 2022 proved to be quite an eventful year both in and out of the garden! The first year of retirement brought a real mixture of events, emotions and situations, but we did manage to undertake two major developments in the garden.
The pergola referred to above, going over the seating area by the Prunus ‘Kanzan’, was completed early in the year, most of it being done while I was isolating from a very mild case of Covid! The area where the Choisya was cut back has also been replanted, and unfortunately the Choisya didn’t regrow but has been replaced by the slightly smaller “Sundance” variety plus a couple of Ceanothus and two Deutzia x hybrida ‘Strawberry Fields’ to provide summer fragrance. The two photos not only show how the area now looks both during the day and at night, but also the change we have made to the seating!
The second major development we undertook was to re-model the area immediately at the back of the house by creating what we refer to as ‘The Terrace’ – a covered decked area with a balustrade front to provide some protection from the weather. With a new set of steps into the garden this provided an opportunity to re-think the use of this area resulting in an additional number of pots being introduced.
This perspex covering provided an opportunity to introduce something that I have wanted to experiment with for some time. Instead of the usual down-pipe at the end of the guttering we have introduced a rain chain. I think the first one I saw that I really noticed was at The Alnwick Garden in Northumberland and then more recently there is one in a United utilities demonstration garden at the RHS Bridgewater Garden in Manchester.
Not only has this worked very well, in the summer dry spell it also became the home for a while to a Comma butterfly! (Yes I thought it was a leaf at first)
An Experimental Garden 