Charles Dickens
Here in mid-winter-Dorset, most of my gardening friends are sensibly sitting in their armchairs and reading the seed catalogues. Not us! We are outside making a building site into a garden. I say 'us', but it's Piers who is doing the hard work.
The builders left for a break just before Christmas and haven't returned as yet. Before they 'went on', they removed the concrete paving stones from the courtyard and replaced them with pieces of Purbeck stone from a nearby quarry. The stones are laid in a random pattern with small spaces between in the area which will support the table and chairs, and larger spaces over the rest. These spaces will be filled with low-growing plants coming through gravel.
What Piers has done is to form walls and edgings for the raised beds, using more of the same stone, creating an imaginative pattern that supports the soil and gives me a design start for the planting. Work will continue when the builders return and vacate the rest ofthe garden.
My first job was to strip as much ivy as possible from the walls and give the overgrown honeysuckle a severe haircut. I have created the most enormous, teetering pile of twigs, which is waiting for the arrival of the skip. Now I can see for the first time how the established climbers trace the walls, and how I can tie them in and give them a new lease of life.
As to planting – the best bit – I have a little fund of plants in the nursery bed. The section of the garden that we are working on is mostly shady, and since you can't really see from the picture what is going to bloom, I'll tell you.
Three 'thugs' – loosestrife, creeping dead-nettle and lady's bedstraw are pushed between the viburnum and the wall, as they get no sunlight at all there, and I hope will therefore not be too rampant. Nearer to us, lily of the valley, geranium, hellebores, primroses, cowslips, pulmonaria, foxgloves, violets and some strands of root that I hope are maidenhair fern. In the walls and next to the steps, anemone blanda, bugle, cyclamen, sedum, saxigrage and alpine strawberries. To finish it off, a few bedding violas to take us into the spring.
The dream is becoming a reality.
