bunn | State of the Garden

Here are some pics of my garden this morning. Tidy people may want to go away at this point, or at least sit down with a nice cup of tea ready to do some intense tutting. My inlaws don't get my gardening approach (basically, lots of weeds/wildflowers, wild and woolly) at all, it makes me laugh when they come round and try desperately to think of nice positive things to say, while clearly looking rather horrified. They are so terribly tidy!

Mollydog inspects a fine growth of nettles. I don't mind the nettles but I shall have to cut these back soon because they are exceeding their allotted space. That balcony in the background isn't mine, it's the neighbours. It's quite nice but not really my sort of thing. In the foreground is my cherry tree which I think is now 4 years old: we had 4 cherries for the first time last year, fingers crossed for more this year! In the background, a raised Cornish hedge which I lay from time to time. It's looking quite organised at the moment as I laid it last year.

Rhubarb is doing well, but I really must cut the grass. It's hard to do at the moment though because of all the cowslips and bluebells coming up through it. I need to sort out those raspberry canes in the background.

Az, wondering how to even start trashing a garden this disorganised. In the foreground a mighty pile of stuff that we really must burn fairly soon. This area has just been planted up with piles of snowdrops in the green, so should look lovely in early spring next year. I've got some ferns to plant here too.

A snake's head fritillary! I'm really pleased with this. We planted a bag of bulbs into the grass when we moved in, but only one grew (fritillaries don't transplant too well). Only this year there are 2 of them! It's had a baby! Fingers crossed there will be more next year.

This is our wooded area - once upon a time it was probably an area with a single plum tree. Then the plum tree went mad and tried to take over the world. I beat it back from time to time, but I quite like it as long as it stays put. That's a beech hedge just coming into leaf at the back there. I got the ramsons in the foreground in a plant swap, and they have done really well and spread enthusiastically. They are a bit garlicky, but such pretty flowers.

Lovely new steps. They are made of railway sleepers. That's a hellibore on the right, and on the left is a vast bush of false box (lonicera nitida) which clips into quite a neat ball shape. I have actually clipped it recently, so it's all neat. Well, that's one thing that is.

I think this is the first year that this small crabapple has really flowered well. I've taken out a lot of the things that were behind it, so it gets more sun. That thing hanging in the tree is a solar powered light. That tall dark tree is a Crinodendron hookerianum: it's kind of a weird shape for Crinodendron, but I quite like it, it makes me think of olive trees. It will have huge bell shaped red flowers later on in the year. That pink azalea behind the apple tree is probably going to be removed and replaced with a yellow one, as I don't really care for pink azaleas.

Patio and chairs. Yes, I know it's a bit overgrown. That's how I like it. There are more solar lights along the back wall, and most of that foliage around the chairs is a blue trailing campanula. It looks sensational when it's in flower.

The nice thing about this informal hedge is that there is always something flowering in it. At the moment it's the berberis and camellia on the left. I've just had about 5 feet taken off the top of it, as it does have somewhat megalomaniac tendencies.

Yama, probably making some sort of rude comment about how the grass needs a cut.

This lunchtime I dug a trench (ow the soil was stony) and planted the first 7 of my copper beech hedge. I hope they don't mind being moved from their 'heeled in' position, they aren't leafed up yet, so fingers crossed.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I love your garden: it feels real and not artificial. I never have quite understood why people like flowers to grow in neat, straight lines. Yours looks wonderful and I can understand your pride.

I like beds to be full of plants. That setup with broad expanses of earth dotted with neat little flowers does not do it for me.

Different strokes on the neat. We try and keep ours tidyish as its nice for us and the wildlife that way without needing too much work. Although the grass needs a cut, or it gets all leggy and bare, so I ought to sort the first one out soon. This yellow thing in the sky keeps appearing and making things grow! So if we don't knock them back into their corner we'll be swamped in nettles and blue meanies.

I think your plum tree has done what our two keep trying to do, send out lots of suckers to "rool teh univerz"

It would probably be fair to say it's a work in progress. The Plum had become multiple long before we moved in, to the point where making it back into one tree would probably require buldozers, but I have been slowly replacing brambles with other things and have now removed many of the very large, not very choice shrubs planted probably in the 1980's, I'd guess, to be replaced with more controllable things.

I keep trying to work out where would be a good place to grow brambles, as the jelly is excellent, but it's hard to find a good place for them. Nettles are easier: the variety we have here is fast-growing but not particularly persistent or robust, so in places where I don't want them, I can usually just mow them and they go away.

Possibly the way to grow brambles is in a very formal way on an island trellis - so you can mow all the way round, they can't get into anything else, and they look deliberate... Hum.

Yay for the snake's head fritillary! We tried growing them in N'cle and none of them came up, at least not while we were there. Possibly the current owners have a wonderful crop of them :-)

I think your garden is nice, at least it's pretty and wild, ours is just wild at the moment :-( though Bacchus did cut the grass last weekend so it's not as bad as it was. I dread to think what my Mum will say when she sees it, but I think my response will be to wordlessly hand her some gardening gloves and a trowel... ;-)

I bet the cats will enjoy exploring it once the nicer weather is here, and you can watch them with a glass in hand and congratulate yourself on having made them such a rich environment ;-)

That is a wonderful garden! Wants! It is similar to the sort of garden I grew up with, probably less vegetables though, Dad was very keen on his home grown veg.

I would really like to grow more veg, it's the thing that tends to slip for lack of time. I am planning a series of raised beds in the area to the left of those new steps: I need to move all the heeled-in beech saplings first though.

Last year I grew salad quite successfully in the greenhouse, and I've also grown physalis, melons and peppers in there. This year, sadly, it's still a jungle that needs clearing and re-mulching before it will be good for anything.

However, I am reasonably lucky with fruit: we produce a lot of apples, raspberries and rhubarb (OK, rhubarb isn't really a fruit, but it sort of fits in to that group!)

State of the Garden

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