a fantasy beach garden

I've been weeding the gravel in the front garden alongside the long bed.  This is a fiddly task, though the results are immediate.  Gravel is a wonderful growing medium for seedlings, and if you ever find it described as a weed supressing mulch I suggest you skip straight on to the next article.

One end of the long gravel is subdivided off into the foreground for the System's Administrator garden hut.  The rest of it forms the backdrop to the garden railway, which currently needs some work doing to get the track up to the mark.  All of it was originally lawn, which did very badly on the light soil, and was never used for anything in particular, so was scrapped years ago.

The hut was built from scratch from timber, not bought as a kit.  Even the window is homemade, though I think the door is prefabricated.  It is furnished with a very small woodburning stove, and some pictures, and a desk, and a shelf with the only two trophies we ever won for Old Gaffer racing, then a lot of modelling equipment found its way in and it became a garden room cum miniature engineering workshop.  It was built partly because the S.A. likes designing and building sheds, and its purpose now is for the S.A. to have somewhere to go that is not in the house.  For this reason it had to be fairly close to the house, and so it ended up crammed in next to my greenhouse and right in front of the hedge.

The hut is modelled loosely on a beach hut.  This reflects the influence of the general 1990s fashion for beach themed gardens, but was also a conscious choice given we live only four miles from the sea and have had a boat of one sort or another for the past quarter of a century.  It is painted blue (definite shades of Alan Titchmarsh) and has a little porch and you can see it here.  It is traditional for beach huts to have a name.  The best one I ever saw was at Harwich and was called Arijaba (try saying it out loud).  The blue hut is called Dunadmin, and a friend made us a sign to go over the door.

The divider between the blue hut's garden and the rest of the long gravel is made entirely out of reclaimed and found materials, which I'm rather proud of.  The posts were begged from work when they demolished a pergola that used to have vines growing over it and house the shade loving plants.  (Clearing the vine leaves off the plants was a wretched job, and it was a great relief when the structure was replaced with a tunnel with shade netting on it).  The S.A. worked out the relative heights of the three posts using the golden ratio as a starting point, and the proportions do look right.  The chain is an old anchor chain from a former boat, which we have used for its original purpose in years gone by.  You can see the approach to the blue hut here.

There are rings of stones with holes in hung from the posts, which I've collected over the past couple of years while weeding.  I almost never used to see any, but I must have got my eye in as I find them regularly now, and being a Darwinist as opposed to a Creationist I assume they have been on the premises for a few million years and didn't just appear.  They are threaded on to nylon fishing line, which has many uses (including repairing the cat's knee).  The anchor on the ground came with a boat, and we didn't fancy using it for actually anchoring, and the brass navigation lights are off another former boat.  We did use them for a while, though with electric bulbs rather than oil lamps, before deciding that modern lights were less picturesque but safer.  The squashed lobster pot on the porch was bought at the Rye branch of Nauticalia the day after my fourtieth birthday.

The upright piece of timber with a hole in it was salvaged from a beach in Northumbria.  I found it, and instantly coveted it.  The Systems Administrator said 'I've already tested that, it's too heavy for me to carry'. There was no way I was going to give up a lovely piece of driftwood like that, and I said with hauteur that I would carry it myself.  It was very heavy, and we were a good half mile from the car.  I did have to stop for a lot of rests.  As we neared the car park an old boy eyed it up, and asked if we were going to have a bonfire.  Er, no.  Bits of wood like that cost good money at Hampton Court Flower Show, and anyway things you have found or made yourself have more significance.

I did have to buy the baulks of wood for the path.  They came from a garden centre specialising in landscape materials, and described as railway sleepers, though they were brand new and not coated in tar (a plus) and I think railway sleepers are larger than that, and nowadays made of concrete anyway.  I did my lower back a serious mischief settling them into their holes, which I only realised afterwards.  If you are contemplating making anything similar then do be very careful how you manipulate large pieces of wood in holes in the ground.  They get slippery in the winter, and the S.A. isn't very keen on them.

As a fantasy garden feature it is gloriously hackneyed, rapidly becoming a period piece, and I'm fond of it.  I've just planted some seed-raised sea campion along the bottom of the post and chain.  The problem is the setting, sitting as it does right in front of a native field hedge which does not say 'seaside'.  If it was in the middle of a large expanse of gravel, or in front of a tamarisk or sea buckthorn hedge, or even a concrete wall, it would be much more convincing.  And the crab apple just beyond the divider doesn't scream 'seaside' either, but it predates the blue hut and is a good tree and I'm not getting rid of it.  And the greenhouse doesn't help at all, though I have partially screened it with a trellis I built myself (it took a very long time).  Designing a garden is largely about the intelligent division of space.  We have succeeded pretty well in the back, but not really in the front.  But the blue hut is fun, and the Systems Administrator likes it in there.

watering and weeding

I ended up spending today working in the top part of the garden.  I had a few plants sitting in their plastic pots that would have been better off in the ground, and their intended site was ready for them, so it seemed sensible to get on and plant them.  I had promised that I would start clearing the nettles and weeds in the bottom part of the garden where we are supposed to be building a new deck to make a sheltered, shady place to sit in the summer, but the work in the front took all day.  Things planted this spring needed watering, as did things planted last autumn, and some planted longer ago than that.

The Strulch has been proving its worth, as there was a marked contrast in weediness between the areas I'd mulched (a few odd weeds) and the areas left bare pending further planting (a generous crop of groundsel, and sundry fat hen, chickweed, and sow thistle).  I pulled these up, and planted the buckets of Muscari armenaicum bulbs that have been sitting in the woodshed since I dug them up a couple of months ago when I was forking the bed over.  Some people hate this grape hyacinth, because it is weedy and ineradicable and spreads like hell, but I don't mind it spreading.  It is pretty, and this is a self-seeding sort of garden anyway, and frankly I'm grateful to anything that really wants to grow and flower in the arid sand at the top of the slope (apart from the creeping sorrel).  I strulched the gaps to avoid a fresh crop of weeds, and will push the mulch aside when I come to plant them up.

The olive tree still shows no signs of making new leaves, but is green under the bark, and has about two green leaves hanging on in the middle.  I'll tidy up the thin twigs at some point soon which I'm sure are dead, but I cling to hope that there might be life further down.  I have run the hose on it a couple of times.  Something that has pleasantly surprised me by shooting from the base is the Colletia paradoxa.  This is a strange shrub.  The branchlets are reduced to flat, extremely sharp, triangular spines.  The plant is greyish green, and carries sweetly scented small white flowers in autumn.  Hillier's manual of trees and shrubs describes it as being rather slow growing, and it is, although mine speeded up appreciably after being put on a diet of 6X, fish blood and bone, and very occassional irrigation in dry spells, which make me think that despite its gaunt appearance it enjoys good living.  By the end of winter the whole plant was burned and brown, and I though I had lost it, but today I found green shoots coming from below soil level.  They were a fresh shade of green with little leaves, not very like the mature branches, and at first I wondered if they were some new weed, but identical shoots were growing from the base of the stem, just above ground level, so unless the plant was originally grafted, which I don't think it was, these must be the immature shoots.  I haven't chopped off the dead top yet, partly because I was busy doing other things, and partly to protect the new shoots from accidents, principally me treading on them.  The frail new shoots of a white Lespedeza, that had made it up to a few cm tall, seem to have disappeared without trace in the droughty vastness.

The wind had got quite a nip in it when the sun went in, and I stomped around the hall, garage and greenhouse searching for my fleece hat, and worrying that I must have left it in the garden somewhere, before finding it in the kitchen full of lumps of white quartz that I carried up from the conservatory in it about two weeks ago in order to wash them.  It is fortunate that I share a house with somebody who thinks it's OK to keep a hat full of stones on the kitchen worktop for a fortnight.

mystery pests and the problem with chopped bark

I went down the garden to plant out a tray of primroses I got at the farm shop (twelve chunky module grown plants for a fiver.  I had some before and they were excellent).  Something has been digging again.  Looking at where the holes were and the remains of leaves lying around I worked out it had gone for the variegated leaf arums.  From the scale of the holes this wasn't a mouse or a vole.  Rabbits?  Badgers?  I can't blame the cats for not taking on badgers.  We were chatting a few evenings ago about how nowadays you can get small motion sensitive infrared cameras mounted in a waterproof box, that store their own data for several weeks so don't need linking to a computer.  I think we might need one sooner rather than later.  I want to know what it is and where it's getting in.  (A friend rigged up a camera on the end of his garage to find out what was setting off his dogs at one o'clock every morning, attached to an old PC in the garage.  Unfortunately the noise of the fan or the faint light from the box scared off whatever it was, because it never came again, except on the one night when the system was switched off for some reason).  Maybe on this basis I don't need a camera, just something that makes a little noise and emits some light.

On a completely different topic, anybody who suggests that chopped bark over mypex makes a good surface for a path hasn't tried living with the results for any length of time.  I had this along the end of the house by the dustbins, and after a few years the bark has composted down and weeds grow in it freely.  I'm now having to pull up the weeds, and scrape up the rotted bark (which would be a jolly nice mulch if it weren't full of weed seeds).  I shall use stones instead.  In fact to start with I shall use all the stones I find while weeding that aren't especially attractive.  I found another today with a hole in it.  Only a small one, but every little helps.

interesting stones

I was weeding today, in the process of which I collect any interesting stones.  My corner of North Essex sits at the southern limit of the last glaciation, and once formed the bed of the river Thames, when it was still a tributary of what is now (I think) the Rhine.  You can read all about it in a useful book 'Essex Rock', now out of print but available from Essex libraries (which is how I read it hence I don't have a copy immediately to hand to check that it was the Rhine that the Thames flowed into).  Thus there are a lot of interesting stones.  I use large flints for decoration in some parts of the garden, and rounded pebbles in others.  In a year I probably collect as many round pebbles as I could buy from a garden centre for about £8.99, but that's not the point.  I haven't yet worked out a use for the pointed stones the size of a finger, which look like fossilised teeth and almost certainly aren't any such thing.  I'm sure something will occur to me, so in the meantime they sit in a jar by my desk.  My favourite stones are the ones with holes through them.  I found one of those today.  I plan to string them on a thin but rot-resistant cord and hang them in the front garden, but there's a way to go yet, as today's find brings my total to eight.  That's not enough for a really good string.