Project 52 - Week 22 - Tidying the Garden Borders

Since having the landscape gardeners in to do some work in our small city garden, as featured in a previous post, I've been taking a long hard look at it.  I planted up the borders 4 or 5 years ago when I was doing an RHS certificate part-time at a local horticultural college, so I had access to some lovely and very reasonably priced plants which they sold in the shop there.  Each week I would come home with different plants and try them out in the garden.  Many of them haven't survived for one reason or another, possibly they just didn't like the position they were planted in or some just got diseased, eaten by snails or whatever and I got rid of them.  What is now left in the garden are the plants that were the hardiest and most suited to the soil and conditions.

I love most of what is in the garden, but there were a few plants and trees that just still weren't thriving and in a small garden it matters more that what is in there works well.  Over the last couple of weekends OH cut the new grass lawn for the first time and gave me the all clear to walk on the grass after having it re-turfed, so I decided to tackle the borders, going through them with a dose of salts.  I tweaked the layout, moved odd plants from one place to another, especially where they were squashed up against the new fence, removed a couple of diseased trees/plants and thinned out parts of the borders where the plants were just too crowded, finding new spots for things I took out.  I really enjoyed myself and it was great exercise too.  It's amazing how stiff I felt after an afternoon or two of digging and weeding.

I thought that I would need to buy quite a few new plants to fill in gaps, but to be honest the plants I had in the garden and in pots around the garden have mostly been sufficient.  I don't want to make the mistake of overcrowding again.  I did buy a few inexpensive plants, a white cosmos. a white dahlia and another orange blossom which should provide some much needed flowers, where there are very few, plus I bought a couple of artichoke seedlings the other day for £1 all from our local discount store.  I'm thinking that I might put them in the borders as they are wonderfully architectural when they grow and the bees love the flowers.  Also, if ever I do give up my allotment, I think I will miss seeing the artichoke plants I have there, which grow huge each season.

Here's a picture of what the garden looked like post-makeover, but pre-border tidying.

And here's a picture of the garden after I'd done the work.

The changes are subtle, so it may not look any different, but I am quite happy with the new simple thinned out layout.  It's lacking a little in height on the left hand side now the trees have gone, but I'm hoping the grape vine I've planted on this side of the garden will add a bit more interest higher up when it eventually grows and the cosmos and orange blossom once they've grown a bit should provide a bit of floral interest.  I've noticed that there's not a whole lot of flowers in the garden really, which personally I don't mind so much.  I guess I must be more of a shrub lover, probably because they are easy to look after and require very little maintenance.   I might add a few more at some point over the summer months.

Anyway, having forked over the whole of the borders, removing any encroaching weeds and bindweed roots lurking beneath some of the larger more established shrubs, and having made sure that everything has the room it needs, I can now relax and enjoy the garden for what it is for the remainder of the summer.  This, incidentally, also frees me to now focus my attention on my allotment and on growing things in the greenhouse.

Joining in with Dreamer at Living a Slow and Simple Life in carrying out a must do task each week for a year.