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| The newly competed north front refurbishment, December frost 2006. |
This makes me feel cold just looking at it! I planted wall flowers
last winter with forget me not and Queen of the Night tulips. The wall flowers were totally demolished by the bunnys.
The Doberman was not doing her job.
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| The Willow Tree in September |
When we arrive here in 2004 this willow tree was in some distress.
It was shedding its leaves even in May. We had a specalist look at the tree and he confirmed that it was in trouble.
Pollard the tree was the suggestion and that happened in February 2005 and just look at it now! The tree sits at
the top of the steep bank which is front of the cottage and it is the centre piece of the refurbishment of that bank.
This work will start again in about November once we have cleared up all the leaves. The two stone pots were added last
year. There had been similar pots here some 30 or so years ago but they had been removed by a previous owner.
These were a "snip" at a local auction and have been planted up as you can see with geraniums. There are plastic pots
inside the stone one and they are changed three times a year so as to keep the planting looking fresh. It will be the
turn of the winter pots very soon. To age the pots when we got them I painted them with cow manure. Very messy
but it worked.
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| The under gardener at work. |
The under gardener said when we came here one of the most important aspects
of this garden would be the ability to process everying that we removed from the boarders. To this end he set about
purchasing the equipment necessary to quickly compost down everying I take out of the garden. Here you see the two different
kinds of shredders we use as well as the Hipo bag I put everything into till we have time to process it. This job is
done about once a week at the change over period of each of the planting successions. The finely chopped material is
then added to one of the many compost bins that we have.
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| Pride & Joy for the under gardener - compost! |
As you can see we have many bins and they are all in use all the time. It
never ceases to amaze me how it all rots down and ends up being a relatively small amount compared with what we take up. What
is slightly out of shot here in the leaf bin. This is about to be turned out and added to the other bins now it has
rotted down. The "tin man" as I call him disposes of the nasties such as leaf with black spot and bind weed. Some
of the rubbish is considered by the under gardener as not suitable for HIS compost bins so finds its way to the local tip.
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| Entrance from the orchard into the small woodland garden. |
This picture was taken nearly three years ago. We have cut back a good
deal of the foliage here to make it lighter as you enter the woodland walk. The Mock Orange has just the most wonderful
fragrance as you enter here. We have built an archway into this part of the garden and have planted it with jasmine
and roses.
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| Here we have the pristine driveway to nowhere, to be turned into a gravel garde! |
To add extra interest the under gardener suggested a gravel garden.
He felt that this drive way was not used for vehicles and was rather wide for just a path. We set about, or rather I
set about digging holes into the drive with a mattock and planting some plants we had going spare. Then we waited to
see if they would survive. I had read about Beth Chatto's gravel garden and employed the same method of planting.
Big hole, lots of compost and then leave them to it. When it appeared it would be OK I ordered more plants from the
Beth Chatto website. All of them were chosen with care to survive in the conditions they found themselves in.
We had one fatality during the winter. Some of them needed covering for the first few months so they had plastic buckets
and containers over them. Some of these were black and some were white. The whole effect was to look as though
some bizarre chess game was going on!
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| Dobie checks out the goings on. |
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| A view of part of the gravel garden looking towards the long boarders. |
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| The Sunken Garden. June 2007 |
This was taken on one of the few nice days we had in June 2007. The
two stone pots like the stone bench were "bargains" from a local auction. To make them look old I painted them with cow
manure that had been watered down. The effect was very good, however we have not sat on the bench for a while!
In the past I had painted a straddle stone with live yogurt to age it but it was not successfull as the Dobie licked
it all off!
For over fifty years two similar pots were at the top of the small steps
but were taken away over ten years ago. They are now at a farm just a mile down our lane. We have photos of them
in their original position and have tried to replicate them with the ones you see. When I have learnt more about scanning
in the old photos we have of the cottage I will post more of them on to the site.
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