I've been weeding the gravel in the front garden alongside the long bed. This is a fiddly task, though the results are immediate. Gravel is a wonderful growing medium for seedlings, and if you ever find it described as a weed supressing mulch I suggest you skip straight on to the next article.
One end of the long gravel is subdivided off into the foreground for the System's Administrator garden hut. The rest of it forms the backdrop to the garden railway, which currently needs some work doing to get the track up to the mark. All of it was originally lawn, which did very badly on the light soil, and was never used for anything in particular, so was scrapped years ago.
The hut was built from scratch from timber, not bought as a kit. Even the window is homemade, though I think the door is prefabricated. It is furnished with a very small woodburning stove, and some pictures, and a desk, and a shelf with the only two trophies we ever won for Old Gaffer racing, then a lot of modelling equipment found its way in and it became a garden room cum miniature engineering workshop. It was built partly because the S.A. likes designing and building sheds, and its purpose now is for the S.A. to have somewhere to go that is not in the house. For this reason it had to be fairly close to the house, and so it ended up crammed in next to my greenhouse and right in front of the hedge.
The hut is modelled loosely on a beach hut. This reflects the influence of the general 1990s fashion for beach themed gardens, but was also a conscious choice given we live only four miles from the sea and have had a boat of one sort or another for the past quarter of a century. It is painted blue (definite shades of Alan Titchmarsh) and has a little porch and you can see it here. It is traditional for beach huts to have a name. The best one I ever saw was at Harwich and was called Arijaba (try saying it out loud). The blue hut is called Dunadmin, and a friend made us a sign to go over the door.
The divider between the blue hut's garden and the rest of the long gravel is made entirely out of reclaimed and found materials, which I'm rather proud of. The posts were begged from work when they demolished a pergola that used to have vines growing over it and house the shade loving plants. (Clearing the vine leaves off the plants was a wretched job, and it was a great relief when the structure was replaced with a tunnel with shade netting on it). The S.A. worked out the relative heights of the three posts using the golden ratio as a starting point, and the proportions do look right. The chain is an old anchor chain from a former boat, which we have used for its original purpose in years gone by. You can see the approach to the blue hut here.
There are rings of stones with holes in hung from the posts, which I've collected over the past couple of years while weeding. I almost never used to see any, but I must have got my eye in as I find them regularly now, and being a Darwinist as opposed to a Creationist I assume they have been on the premises for a few million years and didn't just appear. They are threaded on to nylon fishing line, which has many uses (including repairing the cat's knee). The anchor on the ground came with a boat, and we didn't fancy using it for actually anchoring, and the brass navigation lights are off another former boat. We did use them for a while, though with electric bulbs rather than oil lamps, before deciding that modern lights were less picturesque but safer. The squashed lobster pot on the porch was bought at the Rye branch of Nauticalia the day after my fourtieth birthday.
The upright piece of timber with a hole in it was salvaged from a beach in Northumbria. I found it, and instantly coveted it. The Systems Administrator said 'I've already tested that, it's too heavy for me to carry'. There was no way I was going to give up a lovely piece of driftwood like that, and I said with hauteur that I would carry it myself. It was very heavy, and we were a good half mile from the car. I did have to stop for a lot of rests. As we neared the car park an old boy eyed it up, and asked if we were going to have a bonfire. Er, no. Bits of wood like that cost good money at Hampton Court Flower Show, and anyway things you have found or made yourself have more significance.
I did have to buy the baulks of wood for the path. They came from a garden centre specialising in landscape materials, and described as railway sleepers, though they were brand new and not coated in tar (a plus) and I think railway sleepers are larger than that, and nowadays made of concrete anyway. I did my lower back a serious mischief settling them into their holes, which I only realised afterwards. If you are contemplating making anything similar then do be very careful how you manipulate large pieces of wood in holes in the ground. They get slippery in the winter, and the S.A. isn't very keen on them.
As a fantasy garden feature it is gloriously hackneyed, rapidly becoming a period piece, and I'm fond of it. I've just planted some seed-raised sea campion along the bottom of the post and chain. The problem is the setting, sitting as it does right in front of a native field hedge which does not say 'seaside'. If it was in the middle of a large expanse of gravel, or in front of a tamarisk or sea buckthorn hedge, or even a concrete wall, it would be much more convincing. And the crab apple just beyond the divider doesn't scream 'seaside' either, but it predates the blue hut and is a good tree and I'm not getting rid of it. And the greenhouse doesn't help at all, though I have partially screened it with a trellis I built myself (it took a very long time). Designing a garden is largely about the intelligent division of space. We have succeeded pretty well in the back, but not really in the front. But the blue hut is fun, and the Systems Administrator likes it in there.
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