I've been replanting the gravel in one half of what we call the Italian garden. The term long pre-dates Monty's excellent TV series, and in truth the resemblence to anything Italian isn't very marked. The Italian garden sits at one end of a largish turning circle, which was laid to grass when we moved in. It was weedy and pathetic turf on the thin soil, and we never used it for ball games (don't play them), sunbathing (why would you choose to sunbathe in your front garden when you have a much more private back garden?) or anything else. It required cutting and looked dull. So we gave up with grass entirely in the front garden, and turned it over to gravel. While we were at it we dug a square formal pond, and made a paved area by the pond, and a paved path across the turning circle. The path is carefully aligned with the front door and is the same width as the porch, an attempt to relate the geometry of the garden to the geometry of the house lifted straight out of the pages of John Brookes. It does work visually. Visitors occassionally notice it, and point it out to us as though it were a marvellous accident we might not have noticed.
The paved area wasn't really used for anything for years. I bought four cube shape lead planters, and a terracotta greyhound couchant from the Whichford pottery, which lounged alongside the pond, and that was about it. We had a small fountain for a couple of years, until it broke down. They always do. The grounds of Writtle College were littered with defunct water features when I studied there. At one point we divided the turning circle in two with a breakwater made out of reclaimed timber, and the other end began to develop a character as a seaside garden, but the end with the pond remained mainly an area that we walked through to get to cars parked on the other side of the drive. It was planted with rosemary, lavender, and a curry plant that spread hugely, plus some self-seeding Euphorbia characias and agapanthus, but it wasn't very interesting. Eventually I got round to buying a cafe table and a couple of chairs, and started putting out pots of geraniums and things for the summer and, based on the mediterranean planting and collection of hardware, it became the Italian garden, or when I'm feeling long-winded, 'the mad decayed Italian garden'. The paving, which was only laid on sand and not hardcore, has become uneven over the years, and poppies and blue Nigella damascena seed freely into the cracks, as do weeds.
I had begun to resent the amount of space that the curry plant took up, and realised I didn't really like the smell, which made me worry that the chicken house needed cleaning out, so I was quite glad that last winter did for it. Removing the remains of that, and the rosemary bushes, which were dying off in patches, has cleared a large space. Some new rosemary and lavender plants went in today, and an Aloysia triphylla, the wonderful lemon scented verbena, which may or may not survive a winter outside. I'd like to add an extra-blue, extra-tender teucrium, when they turn up at work, and some different euphorbias. This scheme was cooked up months ago, when I was tidying the hot tunnel at work, but it's amazing that it is actually happening the same year I thought of it. The winter killing so many of the incumbent shrubs forced my hand rather.
I'm waiting to see if the olive tree will sprout again, or if last winter really was a step too far for it. It made it through the previous one, just, so I don't know whether, if it is dead, to risk another olive and hope we don't have another winter quite so severe for a good while, or whether to substitute with something like Eleagnus 'Quicksilver'. Olives do have such a distinctive habit. Van Gogh captured it exactly in one of the drawings shown in the Royal Academy's exhibition a while back (which was so good that I am prepared to forgive them Modern British Sculpture, as long as they don't do anything else like that for a long time). The deciduous eleagnus are pretty and graceful and have silver leaves, but they don't honestly look a lot like olives.
I feel a bit hypocritical buying the gravel. It came from a local builders' merchants who did a leaflet campaign, and I saw I could buy it by the bulk bag, delivery charge included in the price of the bag. Of course delivery is not actually free, as the gravel costs more, but it does mean I can buy a single bag and not feel I ought to get more to make the delivery cost more economic. After today's efforts I'm about two-thirds through the bag, and wondering if I should have got two bags, except that after the experience with the left-over sand I was trying not to repeat that error. Getting the delivery lorry up the drive was slightly traumatic and I'd rather not order a second bag for a bit, until we've trimmed the hedge along the drive. The new gravel is a perfect match for the existing stuff, which came from the Birch quarry, and I suspect that it came from the same place.
The reason why I feel hypocritical is that there is a planning application in the offing for a large gravel quarry in our parish. I don't honestly want a gravel quarry up the road, and my partner lodged an objection against it on behalf of our household. If the quarry happens it will probably not be a disaster for us. I expect there will be a bit of extra background noise and dust on top of what we get anyway, from the roads and planes and lettuce farm, but when we go for walks past the other quarries in the area they aren't that awful. Until the application is settled one way or the other we would probably find it difficult to sell our house, but fortunately we weren't planning to move at the moment. If the application goes through the house will probably be worth a bit less than it would be otherwise, though if we can stick it out for twenty years or so we have been promised a nature reserve at the end of it, which would be nice. I expect we'll survive the quarry if it happens. But on the whole I would rather it didn't, so I feel mean buying bags of gravel from Birch, where the locals don't want a quarry either. But not so mean I won't buy the gravel.
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