Friday, September 12, 2003

The garden is nearly finished - famous last words?

click here for a larger imageAfter this years amazing temperatures and sunny weather and no rain, I'm amazed the garden has done so well. I have watered once or twice (the local council watered their hanging baskets around the town), I did concentrate on the newly planted areas.


click here for a larger imageWhat an improvement these beds have filled out nicely, with the phlox still flowering well. The tree is a Paulownia tomentosa - The foxglove tree. A dilemma faced is whether to pollard it or let it grow to see the flowers?


The Dahlia 'Whitemans Best' in the foreground flowered all summer long - I've already got some more for next summer at Wilko's. I'm leaving all the tubers in this year as they were reasonably priced and the soil is light and sandy, also a lot of the dahlias were cuttings this year and it was recommended I leave them in the ground till at least November to form reasonable size tubers. I concluded that if they didn't they would die anyway.


click here for a larger imageThis is one of the newest beds just finished, various shades of purple from very deep to violet best describes it, with light varigated foilage plants and lots of grasses. The summer house will be placed in the middle - where the grassy area is - and we hope to have climbers etc growing up it. Over the pathway I'm hoping m'spouse will be building a small pergola to join this bed and the blue and lemon avairy bed.


click here for a larger imageThis is another new bed dug out at the same time. We cheated with these two and hired a turf cutter, whilst I would say it is easier than cutting the turf by hand, on the hottest day of the year we would not recommend it. It cost 35.00 to hire for 24hrs (the cheapest quote by miles) and took about 2 hours, I don't know how ground force manage to make it look so easy - IT IS NOT. The cut turves were transported to the back garden to line the leat by the swimming pool.


click here for a larger imageThe sunken bed looks well established now, you really can hide away. I don't know where all the plants suddenly came from. We managed to get hold of a small childs bench for the littlies to sit on which they enjoy, we also managed to lug 2 huge rocks from the back garden round for sitting on and eating sandwiches.


click here for a larger imageOriginally these beds were meant to be one, but I decided it was too big an area and kept the path, much to the childrens delight, one more path to run round.


Our happy little quackers, unfortunately they are no longer all with us, 2 - fox, 1 - mink, but the remaining white and brown one lay one egg a day.


Told you this bed looked bright by the end of the summer.