Digging it

Just a bit of a warning, there are a few photos in this one!

The back garden when we moved in was extremely exciting.

back garden August 2006

It was full of what is known as potential. Oh yes. So all we have to do is a little bit of work to unlock that! I’ve been plotting what I want to grow and where, looking at the shady areas, seeing which bits get damp… And coming up with some bed shapes and things. Today we nearly got them all dug.

back garden November 2006

A little more exciting, no? No? Hmmm… Well, it’ll get there. We’ve moved the compost bin from top left to top right, in an effort to concentrate all the shed and compost nastiness into one big blob. I’ll put something in front of it too – thinking dogwood at the moment, with lovely red stems. They will go in the one bed we’ve still got to dig. The big, old, tired-looking shrub thing was finally defeated by GG today, and we’ve got rid of most of the flagstones. (They will be reused in a different way.)

My parents came to visit yesterday and we had a little trip to the garden centre as part of my birthday present (birthday next Tuesday), so we do have a few plants in there. For later reference as much as anything, they are a skimmia rubella (bottom left corner), one very little green euonymus next to it, a choisya sundance in the top left where the compost used to be, and a pyracantha coccinea ‘Red Column’ against the back fence. There’s also a variagated euonymus that I’ve grown in a pot since buying it last Christmas with Grandad’s Christmas money!

In sweeping up all the leaves into one corner, I was trying to encourage some wildlife. I was thinking aybe a hedgehog, because we do have lots of slugs and snails, and it’d be really handy. But I seem to have created the perfect cat bed…

cat corner

You can just see the tips of the black cat’s ears here… right in the middle. The white thing sloping over is an internal door that we’ve removed, making the perfect roof for the cat bed!

And to round off a lovely day, this was the view from the study window tonight.

sunset

Not bad for bonfire night…