There has been a change of plan with regards to the layout of the garden railway. An area of sidings that lived on a raised board next to the Systems Administrator's blue shed has been declared redundant, impossible to keep clear of leaves. The track was duly lifted, and the board removed for recycling elsewhere. I wasn't sorry to see it go. Most of the railway is discreetly tucked away behind the long border, and the model houses are in any case very cute, but the board was oppressive. The blue shed is a fine construction, modelled loosely on a beach hut and scratch build from planks by the SA's own fair hands, apart from the doors, and I'm in the process of giving it a suitably beach inspired planting, complete with a splendid (and very heavy) piece of driftwood with a hole in it that I salvaged from an actual beach in Northumberland and carried a very long way back to the car. The railway sidings contributed to the picture, but not in a good way.
That just leaves me with the foundations. The SA is not somebody to do things by half or jerry build a set of model railway sidings, and the board was mounted on ten lengths of square fence post, each one held fast in its hole with a generous dollop of postcrete. The SA asked hopefully whether I could use them for something else, but I didn't want a raised platform in that corner of the garden. I had vague ideas of a Nicole de Vesian or Japanese garden inspired series of mounds of clipped box, myrtle, cotton lavender, and germander, that would form a buffer between the beach planting and the railway garden proper. It was not even that vague an idea, since I took cuttings to make it last summer. They have all struck, apart from the box which I did ages ago and which sat there forever, not dying but not rooting either, but I bought some very nice young box plants the past time I was in the Clacton garden centre.
I thought of sawing the posts off at ground level and planting round them, but had a nasty feeling that I'd only be storing up disappointment for the future. The soil is not very good as it is, and who knows whether the questing roots of myrtle and germander like lumps of postcrete when they find it? And my knees would definitely not like finding the sharp corners of the sawn off posts, the first time I accidentally knelt on one while weeding. The posts were going to have to come out. I scraped the gravel away from around the first one, began to prod with a narrow trowel, and realised quite how generous the SA had been with the postcrete.
I got it out by dint of digging a trench around the edge of the lump, scraping away like an archaeologist with my trowel and putting the earth in a bucket so as not to make more of a mess of the gravel than I had to. Assorted roots from the hedge, a ground covering juniper and the 'Red Sentinel' crab apples made the digging less straightforward than it might have been. The post and its base came free just as the bucket was full, so that wasn't as bad as it might have been. After extracting two posts I thought I'd better switch to something easier on the wrists, though, and spend the rest of the day fingertip weeding and spreading Strulch among the polyanthus. That leaves eight posts to go, so it will be a few days yet before I can get my young box plants into the ground.
I thought of clipped mounds for that corner partly because then they would work from both directions, as a backdrop to the railway as well as the beach planting. In traditional Japanese gardens clipped evergreens can symbolise hills, and they can do the same thing for the model railway. I shall put the box at the back, where it will be in shade for part of the day, then the myrtle which will take less than full sun, then the silvery leaved plants in the most sun and nearest the beach garden. That's the theory, and I can let some of the box grow up to provide additional cover from the lettuce field, since the hedge is almost entirely transparent in winter. It will be very nice, once I've got the posts out, and separated out the cuttings and grown them on individually until they are fit to plant out. Instant gardening it ain't.
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