I set an alarm this morning, so that I'd be up and about by the time the gravel came. Admittedly I didn't know what time it was due to arrive, but any time from eight onwards seemed possible. In fact my tactic of going and hanging around in the front garden once it stopped raining was quite pointless, since the first warning we had of the gravel's arrival was when the Systems Administrator took a call from an unknown mobile number, which was the driver asking where we were.
The brambles at the entrance had grown out more than I realised, and the gravel lorry could barely squeeze past. Note to self to cut them back. Fortunately the driver was a cheerful man who insisted he could get the lorry in if he just took a different line, and would be able to put the bags in the same place as I had them last time, which was the first point at which the gravel widened out enough for there to be room for traffic to get round with two bags of gravel parked there. I have planted the area with spiky leaved things, and Zauschneria californica which revels in the extremely sharp drainage, and it is quite jolly in the summer. At the moment most of the inhabitants are underground, and I had moved the sculpture that normally sits there safely out of harms way, to avoid any incidents with swinging dump bags.
I waited until the driver had reversed out (I do feel sorry for people who have to deliver things to our house, and most of them are so nice about it) and then inspected the bags. The firm I use doesn't specify on their website which quarry their gravel comes from, they only give the size, and I had gone for ten millimetre as that's what we've always had in the past. This delivery was such a perfect colour match for the existing gravel that it must also have come from the Birch quarry. It wouldn't be surprising if it was from the same place, since I asked my original gravel merchant for the cheapest, back in the days when we were buying it by the truck load, and the cheapest is likely to be the closest. There are all sorts of things to be said in favour of using local materials, some aesthetic, but stone is heavy stuff, and the smaller the distance it's transported, the better.
The bags looked enormous. When I checked on the phone how large a dump bag was, to make sure I'd had one of those last time and not the next size down, the man on the phone corrected me when I asked if a bulk bag was about a metre in all directions, and said it was more like half that. These looked fully a metre tall and wide to me, and I wondered if I'd ever have the time and energy to spread it all out, or if there would still be half a bag languishing by the entrance at the end of summer. But I do have a lot of thin places to top up, and it was such a palaver getting the lorry in last time that I thought I'd spread the pain over more than one bag.
Ten shovelfuls to the wheelbarrow is my working rule, for pushing gravel around the garden, maybe less if I'm going off the drive and the soil is wet. I expect that hearty young men on landscape jobs manage more, but I wish my back to still be functioning the next day. By the end of the afternoon I'd made an appreciable dent in the first bag, and was starting to think that two bags were not too ambitious. I'd started with a particularly fiddly job, and could have moved more if I'd just been shovelling the stuff out and not weeding as I went.
Refreshing the beach inspired part of the gravel is one of the most painstaking tasks of the gardening year. The gravel is decorated with round pebbles, mostly collected from other parts of the garden when I'm weeding, and shells, so as well as pulling out the seedling grass, nameless vetch, odd bit of ragwort and other unwanted vegetation, and picking out fallen leaves, I have to make sure I don't bury the pebbles and shells as I go, which I do by picking them out of each area as I weed it and throwing them on to a nearby patch I've already done. Then I apply generous shovelfuls of gravel between the patches of thrift, and move on to weed the next gap, depositing pebbles and shells on to the piece I've just done. The sea holly and Crambe maritima are barely visible at this time of year, but there are seedlings of thrift and annual flowers, some of which I wish to keep. The effect in late spring, when the thrift is flowering, along with Nigella damascena, yellow Asphodline lutea, the seakale and the blue spiny flowers of the Eryngium, is striking, but definitely not low maintenance.
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