Wednesday 26 September 2012

Where's he been then...?

I had almost given up on blogging, but thought I'd try to get back into the discipline as the days shorten and opportunities for actual gardening start to wane. It was dark, to all intents and purposes, at half-past five this afternoon as gloom and rain descended for the night. Not good.

It was a busy summer, if a wet one. What this has meant is that the garden is looking very lush and green for this time of year. Usually, on returning from our annual family fortnight by the sea in lovely North Norfolk, the garden is looking a bit dessicated and never fully recovers before the autumnal tidy. This year, there is plenty of green, and colour, to be seen still. And it is the same in other gardens. I remember this time last year, when cutting back and clearing for the winter was already underway (although, of course, we didn't actually get a winter to speak of in the end).

New clients have continued to emerge, without having had to advertise, and I am now fully occupied for the three full days a week I can work. Most gratifyingly, the work I had been doing over the summer holiday at Wyndham Park School has paid off, and the Library Garden is looking really good. Following the ideas suggested by the Headteacher, I have created a number of discrete areas within the space around the new octagonal Library building: a herb garden, wildflower meadow, beach garden, bee & butterfly garden, rockery, and a more traditional herbaceous border.

Left: the wildflower meadow in June 2012












Left: the newly-planted herb garden in June 2012













I will be back at the school tomorrow,  all being well, getting some bulbs in for spring and starting to tidy-up a bit. I have got various different wildflower/meadow seed mixes to try out, so need to clear some spaces and sow these. It will be interesting to see which flourish and which struggle. 

The site is very rough ground indeed: Wiltshire downland chalk and flint, compounded by any amount of builders' rubble from the original school building and the library building last year. It's also pretty windy and exposed, so planting choices have to be fairly robust and able to deal with dry conditions. It would be great to make a 'jungle' garden with some exotics - canna, banana etc - but short of building some quite extensive sheltering fences I am not sure it's practical... we'll see.

There, that wasn't so difficult, was it?