Garden evolution

[cybermule]

The thing I love best about gardening is that it's never finished. Every time I think I can kick back and take it easy for a bit, new things happen and new ideas spring to mind. A lot of what this blog will be about is charting those ideas and influences (and their effects) as they happen.

When I first moved into my house, it was the first chance I had to have a fixable garden. A reasonably sized terrace house sort of garden was a good starting project for someone who was sort of interested in gardening, but had never really tried it. I don't have many pictures of the arly garden, but when I first moved in it was a wilderness of bumpy lawn and waist high weeds, with some bizarre concrete block fish breeding tanks right by the patio. I'll try to find some early pictures showing some of the true horror!

It's slowly evolved over the years. The most recent landscaping I did was over the winter of 2008-09 - I wanted to get rid of the huge and mostly unused greenhouse and put a lawn in for the child to play on. I also had the idea of making an Arts and Crafts inspired garden (I'd visited both Hidcote and Rosemoor the previous summer) with "garden rooms". There's basically a patio, a veg room, a lawn and a more secluded and wild seating area at the far end at this point in time, but who knows how long that'll last?

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Originally published at Terrapy.

Comments

[mallt.livejournal.com]

I need to decide what I want to do in my back garden... I have a deck, that's ok... I have raised beds for veggies & eventually herbs & flowers with what will become a sitting area... but the rest is "lawn" (dandelions with some grass!) I was thinking of putting in a flower bed for plans that like sun all day along the back fence but I can’t put in anything with deep root structures as I have a utility right of way (buried power lines etc.) that I don’t want to mess with! Plus I’m lazy so like perennials but have to pick ones for zone 3 that can do something when spring can arrive late May & we’re lucky to have summer in August! :D

[cybermule.livejournal.com]

This page might be helpful:

http://garden.lovetoknow.com/wiki/Gardening_Zone_3

Quite a lot of those perennials I recognise from english gardens. Plus, a lot of the shrubs and trees look like mountain varieties so probably have reasonably shallow roots and are used to crap soil.

[mallt.livejournal.com]

Thanks... I'll go take a look :)

[aras-55555.livejournal.com]

Nice job with the blog :) What's the palm-like tree thing?

[cybermule.livejournal.com]

Cordyline Australis. It's tougher than it looks.