The story of my garden...

When my husband and I bought our house back in 2011 it was a total blank canvas - a Victorian end terrace house, fairly long and narrow, with a tumble down fence being held up by ivy, and divided neatly into paving / grass / gravel and uninspiring shed.


Blank canvas garden 2011 (with the footprint of a complete path under the lawn)

After 10 years of renting and moving nearly 80 pots and containers to the new house, including a whole raised bed, I was desperate to get finally get started on my own garden.  It wasn't quite as easy as we had hoped - the blank canvas appeared to be a cover only to the full scale patio and garden path lying beneath the lawn and gravel, and my overriding garden memory of Summer 2011 is of injecting glyphosate by hand into a massive infestation of horsetails (Equisetum arvense) which had taken over the entire garden and edges of the patio.

After the glyphosate failed to work and the horsetails were back with a vengeance, the RHS was consulted who recommended soil improvement and plenty of planting to force the horsetails to make a new home elsewhere! And so began an intensive summer digging programme - dig, sieve, remove horsetail roots, dig sieve, remove horsetail roots and repeat multiple times over across the whole garden.  A whole patio and garden path was removed and our Punto nearly broke under the strain of so many trips to the recycling centre, as did we!  Bags and bags of organic matter were added and dug in with chicken manure to improve the structure, moisture and nutrient content of the soil.

In between this and still desperate to get growing we had started to accumulate even more plants - following round trips to parent's and friend's gardens in Scotland and Essex, and making use of all the bargain deals in seed/plant catalogues - 100 perennials for £20 seemed like a good idea at the time!

By the end of 2012 and a lot of earth moving Phase 1 of the garden was complete - gravel path installed, raised bed in place and initial planting complete and starting to take off, just in time for us to leave the UK for 2 years to go to Dublin for work and abandon the garden in the hope that the house rental company would take care of it whilst we were away.

Fast forward to May 2015 and we returned to an overgrown jungle, not quite on the Lost Garden's of Heligan scale, but it was clear that a 'no dig' (or no pruning, weeding, tidying or anything) policy had been applied!

It was a brilliant opportunity for completely reworking and replanting parts of the garden with the ideas bank I had accumulated in the 2 years of having no garden at all to work in. Fences were painted, gutter planters installed, the shed had a makeover, perennials dug up, divided and moved to new homes, a new triangular raised bed constructed, new rockery built, an old pallet up-cycled into a herb and bedding planter, multiple trips to garden centres and nurseries to find more plants to fill in gaps (despite the on-going question from my other half - '"Where will it go?", and my standard response - "I'll make room!"; and more inspirational ideas (and plant finding) trips to the Hampton Court (2015) and Chelsea (2016)  Flower Shows.

By June 2016 the garden rework was complete, with time to sit back and enjoy it......until the next project!

Garden project completed - June 2016
Roses in full bloom
Raised bed full to bursting
Up-cycled pallet planter and homemade insect hotel - 'Creepy Crawly Towers'

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