Two years on: my garden…

Garden Catch Up….

I was updating this site earlier in the week and realised I hadn’t added any new pictures  to my garden page to show the progress I’ve made since I moved in and was faced with this.

A lovely young man called Robert came and did the clearance job, leaving me with a couple of buddleias, a dark pink hydrangea and a well established Clematis Montana growing along the fence. The rest was a clean slate.

That autumn I planted a load of tete a tete daffodils. They are the the ones that grow no higher than 30cm, but they are as tough as old boots and take whatever the weather throws at them, looking bright and cheerful for weeks. I added tulips, because I love them, grape hyacinths for that glorious blue, anemone blanda and snowdrop anemones. And a Christmas rose.

I planted shrubs, too. A myrtle, which isn’t wildly happy in a slightly too shaded spot, flame of the forest, a winter flowering clematis which will take a while to cover the fence, but is getting there. I added an evergreen fern (I like my plants to work hard for their place!) and a couple of ground covering roses in yellow and white.

Two years on…

It’s been two years.

I’ve added a lot of plants in the meantime.

Some have done well. Some have struggled. Gardening, as someone said on Gardener’s Question Time recently, is an experiment. Half the garden is in fierce sun in the afternoon, half of it is in shade a lot of the time. It looks wonderful in the spring because I have so many bulbs, but by the middle of the summer, when the geums and forget-me-nots have gone over and the bulbs are finished, not so great.

Last year I added some cyclamen and wild garlic under the bigger buddleia and they did amazingly well, and some grasses, but for summer colour, I’ve begun to build up my collection of pots. Sadly, we’ve had a lot of wind and rain in the last week so they’re no longer looking at their best, but a few days of sun – if we’re lucky – will soon have them brightened up. T

here are more pictures on my garden page.

This autumn…

I have an order in for some wonderful tulip bulbs, I have wallflowers and  antirrhinums, grown from seed, primroses and a few more of those irresistible small daffodils ready to be planted. I’ll keep you posted.

Happy gardening!