What have I been doing these last few years?

I am ashamed to see how long it has been since I posted anything on this blog. This is not to say that I haven't been gardening, just that I have not found time to write about it. When our 18-month house re-build and renovation juddered to a halt we still had endless snagging and large areas of the rest of the house to update. Like painting the Forth Road Bridge, this seems to be an endless process and I'm on some infernal loop of incompletion! It takes up a lot of time and energy - let alone dealing with the rest of life.

And so to the garden. What's been happening there? Well, we did a lot of re-landscaping as a result of the build. Much of the garden nearest to the house had been trashed by the works, but all of it was recoverable with new turf and some imagination! Our main aim was to create spaces where we could sit outside without being whipped by the High Peak winds. To that end we created a balcony - a superb, hot sun-trap - nestled between three sides of the building, and a large terrace, protected by the rising land, which runs straight out of the new kitchen area. To take the oppressive rising land away from the house some more, we then created another mini grassed terrace as an intermediate step up before the main lawn.

All of these works of course took time to think about, design and implement and then I had to think about the planting. In the first summer I chose lavenders for quick impact in the planting trough around the main terrace. While pretty and fragrant, they lose their shape in winter and become scruffy dead wood. So the following year I replaced them with box hedging - year-round green and nicely formal close to the house. I am keen on that classic principle of landscape design - formality closer to the building, subtly becoming less and less formal as you move away. To that end, I continued with the box on the higher terrace - balls and cones this time, procured cheaply from supermarkets rather than expensively from garden centres or nurseries. I mixed in purple lavenders and white and purple sages to complement the box and fill the spaces. Native purple foxgloves cheekily chose to muscle their way into the scheme and the result delighted me - formal, informal and plain wild, all existing happily side by side. You had artistic height from the foxgloves at the back, strong masculine shapes from the box, and flowering femininity from the lavenders and sage. And all in a relaxing palette of green, white and purple. I added to this some compact clumps of white scabious as well as some white-flowered alpines and ground-over. There is gravel between the irregular flagstone path and I further softened this with creeping thyme and other low-lying ground cover plants. By the hot summer of 2018 it looked pretty as a picture.