My Garden #1

Well, as you'll have noticed, my posting has been sporadic to say the least over the past weeks. Apologies for this!! I referred in an earlier post to the building work that was taking place here, thus forcing us out the house for a while. Well, this continued rather longer then expected and then I was out of the country again.

Things have calmed down somewhat now, though, and I thought it's about time I started sharing my garden here, the progress that's been made so far and the future plans for it. This first installment takes me back to a photograph that was taken almost a year ago today.


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This gives you a good idea of the starting point we inherited this garden in; namely, pretty blank. There was a circular patio that I took up, mostly because it was overgrown but also it seemed to be in rather a random place. The outline is still visible halfway down the lawn and the slabs stacked up under the tree in the top left corner.

Another intriguing feature of this garden is the absence of any boundary down one side. I say intriguing, it's actually not far short of downright annoying. The path that runs the length of the garden is effectively the boundary. This makes a garden design somewhat tricky as I've been having to contend with a garden that has no vertical dividing boundary. There are numerous difficulties with taking up the path and putting a boundary in, so the solution I'm working towards will work around it.

Some further background: the garden is around 30m in length and about 3.5m in width. So very long but very narrow. It's west-facing, so gets a fair amount of sunlight throughout the day.

So, this is the canvass that I started with.....and just to set your expectations progress has been slow so I'm not much further along. But I will be sharing the plans and will be looking forward to getting your thoughts and ideas as I get further along.

And if any of you have any experience of working without boundaries (literally in this case, not metaphorically), then I would be pleased to hear them.

A Perfectly Good Reason Not To Do Anything

I was much encouraged by the RSPB's monthly "Home for Wildlife" e-newsletter that landed in my inbox this week. Their tip for the month was to leave an area of the lawn uncut!! For me, that's great news, as you'll see from this photo.

This is the bottom half of my very very narrow but long garden. The bottom half is the half I have yet to get to, having spent the last few months slowly (very slowly) building a patio at the top end - the first step in the gradual and intended transformation of this garden.

For now, thanks to the timely advice from the RSPB, I feel less guilty looking down the garden.