Wednesday 6 August 2014

the railway garden resumed

Sandwiched between the long bed and the boundary hedge is an accidental, unplanned space.  If I were setting out a garden from scratch now I would know not to do it the way I did twenty years ago, and the space wouldn't arise, but that was then and it did.  Initially it was raw earth, uneven from having the apple orchard grubbed out of it, and then it was smoothed off and made into a poor quality lawn which was never used for sitting on, playing games, or anything else, and then it was turned over to gravel, but not gardened very much because it was barely visible from the house and nowhere near the top of the list of priorities.

Then it came in useful, because the Systems Administrator wanted to build a garden railway, and a long thin space allowing a full scale mile of track, somewhat shielded from the rest of the garden, suited both of us as a place to put it.  The initial attempt at railway building proved as flawed as my first efforts at garden design, and the SA slightly lost heart as track defects derailed the tiny trains, and the model buildings fell apart in an English winter out of doors.  I occasionally pulled out the worst of the weeds and encroaching ivy, until I began to wonder whether the SA was ever returning to the project, or if I could hide the abandoned track under some shrubs.  A garden railway is one thing, a derelict garden railway is vaguely depressing.

Then the SA found new energy for the project.  Sections of track were relaid, others were declared unviable and I was promised the ground could be released and returned to the garden proper.  And the SA got a new book on garden railway planting, which was passed over for me to look at.  I took this as a signal that I was welcome to resume planting things with appropriately minute leaves if I so wished.  I was quite happy to play in the gravel around the railway, since it is virtually the last undeveloped space this side of the meadow, and I have always liked alpines.  I sometimes have fantasies of cultivating them as a retirement project, when I am too old and feeble to cope with a large garden, and no longer able to bend or kneel.

The railway garden is definitely not a place for tiny treasures.  The soil is the merest light sand and infested with roots from the hedge, a very poor substitute for an alpine scree washed through with melt water.  The area to be covered is large and my budget is finite, so each individual plant needs to cover a reasonable patch, otherwise the railway garden will cost more than if I were covering it in the finest Axminster with premium underlay for good measure.  And it is the SA's project, so any plants that go in at this stage might need to come out again to make way for subsequent building works, which is fine if they're quick, cheap and cheerful, not so good if they cost an arm and a leg each and it was a red letter day when after several years they reached a diameter of six inches.

From past experiments I know that creeping thyme grows well, flowers abundantly, and seeds itself, but is not awfully weed suppressing.  Arenaria montana has done pretty well, making quite dense mats, flowering profusely, and seeding itself about.  Small leafed hebes more or less gave up the unequal struggle, faced with drought and famine.  A tiny leafed pink remained solid, but didn't spread out into mats as fast as I'd hoped, likewise a miniature thrift.  A Parahebe coped, just, while a dwarf prostrate Penstemon suffered without dying entirely.  Alyssum spinosum, which I adore, struggled about as much as the Penstemon.  Antennaria made big, solid, spreading mats and looked as though it planned to continue, slowly but indefinitely.  Dwarf Phlox seemed worth persisting with. I knew from my efforts to cover the ground in parts of the long bed that Teucrium chamaedrys would cope after a slow start (and in fact after being agonisingly slow to get going it is showing potential to be invasive, sending out underground shoots that pop up through other things some way from the parent plant), and that prostrate Gypsophila would survive.

That gave me a sort of feel for roughly where to pitch my efforts.  Faced with planting ground of unknown quality, but which you suspect is going to be difficult, there's a lot to be said for treating your first attempts as sighting shots, trying a bit of this and a bit of that and finding out what works, then building on your successes, and giving up on the failures without wasting too much money or energy on them.  From my first experiments at planting up the railway garden it became pretty clear that it was only worth bothering with the toughest plants, as the triple whammy of the light soil, root competition from the hedge and low rainfall was going to see off anything else.  It's good to know where you stand, and armed with knowledge I started to explore the on line catalogues.

And had a ball, but that's a story for another day.


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