After I revamped the bottom of the garden, the new worst looking bit of the garden was the next section up – the bit that once upon a time used to be a big square of gravel. The whole thing was horrible, overgrown, covered in grass and weeds, and a lot of the weed suppressing plastic was ripped up. It pretty much looked like this since day one:
The part I’m talking about is the bit not currently covered by fence panels. You can just about see some gravel inbetween the tufts of grass and weeds. It did seem rather a daunting job to even consider starting but after digging up nettles for weeks I felt like I could tackle just about anything this garden could throw at me lol.
So I started to clear it of weeds and grass…
Guess what’s in all of those black bags – yup nettles!
So I got it to this stage, where my idea was then to turn it into a kind of Parterre. What’s a parterre I hear you ask, well :
A parterre is a formal garden construction on a level surface consisting of planting beds, edged in stone or tightly clipped hedging, and gravel paths arranged to form a pleasing, usually symmetrical pattern
If you click on the above link for wikipedia, you will also see some examples of parterres and knot gardens. eg
Now mine will probably not look anything like that and will be more likely a little more rough and ready, and yes it’s definitely not Japanese but I wanted to do something with this gravel patch so this is it.
Anyway, moving on…
I did measure it out before I started and then found the centre and using a piece of string, marked out a circle for the middle. Where the circle intersects with the sides forms the corner beds and although I discovered that my gravel “square” is really slightly more rectangular I think it will work out OK. I’m also going to have some spare gravel by the looks of things. Before I started clearing the weeds it really seemed to have so many bare patches that I thought there wouldn’t be enough gravel but turns out I got excess now that I’ve moved it away from the corners.
This was taken on 12 November 2009, and as you can see, it’s really getting there. Also most of the black bags have gone now so I can actually see what I’m doing. The corners have been cut out, two corners and the middle have been dug over, soil under the plastic is pretty poor, and seems to consist of brick dust! But I’ll worry about that when the time comes for planting.
At the moment I am considering moving the Kilmarnock Willow down here for the centrepiece but it says you have to wait till it’s dormant before you move it and the bloody thing is still green!
*****
Update:
After the above photos, the weather got too wet and cold to be doing anything and then it went from that to snow for weeks, so I didn’t get back in the garden till about March/April.
I recently got a bargain price cherry tree so I figured that would go nicely in the centre of the parterre. What I wasn’t planning on though was planting more trees here as that sounds more like an orchard! I was going to plant the apple trees further up the garden but whilst chatting with my neighbour about fruit trees and how it would be nice to have a mini orchard it occurred to me that I could do exactly that and have one here. Part of it will be in the shady side of the garden but I’m hoping the trees won’t mind too much. So we have Morello cherry in the middle, russet apple on the left and braeburn apple on the right. Had the trees for a while but they looked pretty dead when they arrived so I was reluctant to plant them until I saw some sign of growth. Now I need two more fruit trees for the remaining corners.
Decided to put the second Japanese arch here leading through into the parterre, so I dug up some turf and then secured the arch in the ground with ground spikes, after I painted it black. I think it looks pretty good for my half price bargain basement arch lol. Leftover bits of concrete wall act as a path through the arch and I decided to drag my chopped down willow tree down here as a “feature”.
This was taken on 4 June 2010. Two more trees were planting – two bramleys I hope – the labels were missing so it could be a surprise. Some of the herbs have been planted in the four corners, gravel’s been raked out a bit more and I put some cobbles between the old concrete walls to make the entrance pretty. I don’t know why but I really love the cobbles here. It’s very simple and make with old bits of concrete and leftover cobbles but I just like how it looks.
