Come in to the garden

For a joyous 4 months at the beginning of this year we were blessed with an empty ground floor flat. This meant that, apart from not being disturbed by noisy neighbours, we also had the garden to ourselves.

To recap, this is what we found when we bought the house in 2007:

After some cutting and clearing last year, the addition of a new fence and the introduction of a raised bed, things began to look much better.

However, I had been unsure how much work to do on the garden since it is technically shared by the downstairs flat as well. Our last neighbours took no interest in it at all. Thus, whilst we had it to ourselves I decided to try and improve it to the point that we could take pride in it and, when we come to sell, it might not actually put people off! Plus, I thought if we made a show of caring for the garden the new neighbours might too.

So in January Miles and I with stoic help from my Dad pulled down all the overhanging creeping vine and chopped down as much as we could of the dead tree. Which left us with this:

We then spent a couple of weeks burning that giant pile in our new incinerator bin - very exciting!

Then this spring I've been adding in more flowers and introduced a container garden on the raised shelf at the back (it is filled with soggy gravel from its previous life as a pond/bog so I thought it was probably easier to put things on top rather than to try and clear it out. Miles lugged 3 enormous paving slabs up and down the stairs then across the garden which are what the middle pots are now sitting on). This is how it's looking this morning in the sunshine that followed the rain.

There is now much-needed colour in the garden which makes a huge difference. I'm planning to add more pots and plants throughout the year. The azalea and pansies are the stars at the moment:

Like every other gardener out there, I'm keen to get going with the major vegetable planting. Salads etc are doing well but I'm waiting to let my collection of triffids (or should that be tomato plants?) outside. Currently they are on our dining table wondering if the humans will make a good dinner...