I continued weeding the gravel today, working along the back of the long bed. The creeping thyme is beginning to spread itself usefully. This is Thymus serpyllum ((link to image) which forms low dense mats, in mid July covered in pinky-mauve flowers beloved of bees. The original plants were raised from seeds, sown in pots then pricked out into modules, 6x4 plugs in a standard sized seed tray. Once they had formed solid root balls they were planted into holes scooped in the gravel, and grew away easily. Having experimented with spring and autumn sowings I should say that spring is better, as the young seedlings tend to languish in the greenhouse over the winter, and succumb to the damp, cold and lack of light. There are a few common thyme plants here and there, but they tend to grow somewhat upright and straggly and the creeping sort looks prettier.
The thyme project ran out of plants half way along the gravel. I'm keen to get more ground cover here, because weeding that area of open gravel is a big job, so I want plants I've chosen to smother the ground and out-compete the weed seeds. I've got some seed raised Dianthus deltoides, so am planting those out. They too should self-seed into the gaps and help cover the ground with desirable plants. In the long bed I'm having some success with germander, Teucrium chamaedrys, which after a painfully slow start (admittedly in the worst soil in the entire bed) is forming dense low bushes with little evergreen leaves, covered at the moment with spikes of small tubular dead-nettle type flowers. It is a member of the family Lamiaceae, and like many of its relatives is attractive to bees ((link to image). Clumps of that would look good standing up among the thyme.
I've got a couple of dwarf pines to plant in the gravel. I love pines, and they do well on sand, or at least many of them do, so I bought these as features I wanted rather than ground cover per se. I need to position them so that each has its own space to grow and be seen, rather than forming an amorphous supermarket car park lump with its neighbours.
The ground surrounding the garden railway was landscaped into small hills and hollows, to make it more interesting from a scenic point of view for the railway. The tops of the hills get incredibly dry, and are proving a challenge. Some box plants that went in a year or two back are clinging on to life, but not much more. Their foliage has gone bronze, indicating that they are hungry as well as thirsty, so they had better have a sprinkling of fish, blood and bone and maybe 6X to encourage them. Plants for a garden railway need to have small leaves and flowers, to keep the overall sense of scale. They don't look like a miniature version of full size shrubs and trees, but at least they give the right feel. Modelling magazines give ideas and examples, but many of their suggested plants would never grow on our sand.
As I crawled along the gravel I realised that it really does need topping up in places. Of course the patches where it is thinnest and meanest are those furthest from the drive, since it is the hardest work to push the barrow that far, so they got skimped on first time round. The thought of having to shift another dumpy bag of gravel is a bit daunting, as is the thought of the lorry from the builder's yard squeezing its way into the front garden again, but the gravel really does need to be thicker. It is much easier to weed when there is a good loose layer on top than when the weeds can root straight into the soil. The last time I had gravel delivered I found bits of broken orange plastic afterwards in the hedge, which I fear came from one of the delivery lorry's lights.
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