Making Mud-Pies

After a fortnight's effing and blinding (not all of it out loud), I have now finished preparing the flower-bed for the Spring stuff.

It is in no way the gravel-free plant paradise it ought to be for the amount of work I've done on it. See that pile along the base of the wall? The stuff that looks like a heap of mud? That's not from the digging I was moaning about last week. That's just what came out with the

sieve and trowel
afterwards.

(This is what came out with the fork!)

On the basis that I never want to crumble up another sieveful of solid packed earth ever ever ever again, I mixed in the last of our compost supply to try and improve what it now pleases me to think of as "soil". I'm hoping that if I put swept up leaves on it and dig them in, they will rot down to provide some extra nutrients before I need to plant primroses or violets. In the meantime, I have put in my anenomes and snake's head fritillaries around the pear tree. That's potentially 30 flowers. When they start coming up in Spring, I will be counting...

Things to Do on a Rainy Day (III): Considering Summer and Autumn Flowers

So I know two things about summertime flowers. I know what I would like, and I know what I absolutely do not want to end up with.

I would like to fill the edges of the lawn with lots of bright, cheery things like poppies and cornflowers and big, happy ox-eye daisies and lupins - I love lupins! I remember them all around the sides of the field behind my grandparent's garden, they come out in high summer in lots of bright colours like so many roman candles... and they'd be tall enough to hide the fences.












Ideally, these would be followed in September and October by lots of fiery reds, yellows and oranges in the same spots - dahlias and rudbeckias would be perfect.

Unfortunately, most of these plants like lots and lots of sunlight. This is why they grow in cornfields and not in woods. Now, our back fence gets lots of sunlight, but first of all, this is where the trench around the lawn is deepest, so the small seedlings would probably get shaded out. I will also need most of this space for raspberry canes, as it is where the fruit has the best chance of ripening properly. The trench along the side of the lawn is the bit of the garden which gets the least sunlight, because of the shade from the fence - so it's no go there either. I know from the old place that dahlias and rudbekias do really, really badly in shade. Cornflowers might just about work, and ox-eye daisies seem happy enough in the shady gardens of the surrounding streets.

So began a process of research on plants for shady gardens. This was initially depressing, as it seemed to involve the very set of boring non-native pretentious-colonial-botanist's-collection stuff I associate with the dank, gloomy, formal gardens of dank, gloomy, formal mock-gothic mansions. What was it with the late Victorians? All death and respectability, no fun.




I cheered up a bit after flicking through a pocket paperback on shade plants in the library. It seems most of the summer plants I want to put in the bed under the roses will tolerate partial shade, so I'll fill it with columbines, London Pride and stocks (for scent). I also decided that I will only need about half of the trench along the back fence for raspberries - so the section up to the almond tree will be getting the cornfield treatment after all. Two metres of it will look a lot less dramatic than the whole garden edge, but hey, it's better than nothing. I still won't get dahlias, though.

So what can I do about that terminally shady right-hand trench?

I can use foxgloves instead of lupins, for a start. Bees and butterflies love foxgloves, so that's good. And they have the height to hide the fence. I'll experiment with some of the cornfield type flowers next year and see what happens. Perhaps if I put them in grow beds so that they are level with the lawn, they will get a bit more sunlight, I don't know (I can't just build up the soil to the right level, because it would get soggy, and probably rot the bottom of the fence).

"Bleeding heart" is also apparently reasonably shade tolerant. I'd never heard of it before, but now that I have, I have to have one. Or maybe two, as there is also a white version - appropriate for the garden of a Spurs fan! I think they would grow high enough to give some good cover and colour in the back right-hand corner.

It's all still going to look a bit bare in the autumn, though. The obvious thing would be to go for a climber up the fence which would go bright red. The trouble is, most of them will only do that if they get sunlight. And I hate Virginia Creepers anyway. There's something about the way they spread all the way over walls and along the ground which gives off a 1950s sci-fi comic book vibe - like they want to take over the world while you're sleeping...

Spouse, incidentally, has expressed limited opinions on flowers ("daffodils are evil", and "Bluebells, please!).

Things to Do on a Rainy Day (II): Considering Spring Flowers

I have two areas to put flowers in. One is the corner underneath the retaining wall and along the fence, where the pear tree and the roses are. The other is the sloping trench between the underpinned lawn and the right hand fence.

English spring flowers are all about carpets of snowdrops, primroses, violets, anenomes, daffodils, bluebells... Thanks to a childhood of Sunday trips into Kent, and holidays with rural grandparents in Norfolk, I can pretty much recite the progression in my sleep. And they're all woodland plants, which is good, because in urban terms, we're in the woods.

No daffodils, though :-( . Spouse regards daffodils as "evil flowers"! He's okay about narciscii, but I feel about them rather the way he feels about muscari (narciscii = fake daffodils, muscari - fake bluebells). Still, he's agreed that I can put some crocuses in the sunny right hand corner of the lawn, as they will have finished by the time he needs to start mowing it. A mix of these, with some snowdrops and the almond blossom, should give that corner a lovely cheerful start to the year, visible from our back windows.

I will have to put wood anenomes, primroses and violets under the roses, because they grow low to the ground, so if they are planted in the trench, they will be lower than the side of the lawn and we won't really see them. Under the roses, they'll be hidden from the windows by the retaining wall, but at least we will see them when we are actually in the garden. I'll try chucking in some Snake's Head Fritillaries as well, because they're fun, and also - I could be wrong about this, but - I seem to remember them being endangered when I was a kid. I think bluebells should be tall enough to poke out over the top of the trench at the shallower end of it. All in all, February to May should be easy enough. Get bulbs, shove 'em in the ground, cover with netting to prevent the squirrels getting 'em - sorted.

It's the summer and autumn that get difficult.