When we moved in, we inherited a ‘low maintenance’ garden but like everything in the house, nothing had been done properly and the plant selections and execution were interesting to say the least. Having started with grand plans about excavating a seating area and building a garden room, I calmed down a bit and we set about making it into a cottage garden. The house is a mid-terrace 1880’s cottage so we thought this would suit and it’s our style of garden so sounded like a good plan.

Now, Frank is not a gardener but he is extremely useful. He’s got a construction company that builds one-off individual houses so has every piece of equipment and tool under the sun and can pretty much turn his hand to anything. Plus before he started his company, he used to lay cricket wickets at all the major ECB grounds – Trent Bridge, Edgbaston, The Oval etc etc. So, I knew we’d have a nice lawn! I traded him some of my time helping at one of the site gardens for some time helping me at home…

We smashed up a vile concrete path that ran the length of the garden and set about removing bricks that the previous owner had put EVERYWHERE! We filled two skips and by the end of it I was knackered. I then set about removing all the weed membrane (which hadn’t been put in properly and consequently was covered in weeds!) and about a ton of gravel.

Then came the fun part.

We marked out three large beds that made the most of the width of the garden and helped to demarcate it into areas. There isn’t a lot of room so we needed to make the most of every inch. And we settled on a theme for each bed. One is yellow/red/orange, one is blue/purple/white and one is red/pink/purple. Well in theory anyhow…

 

We left the decking in place as it seemed to be fairly solid and is useful for bbqs etc so we put a small herb garden at the side of that (where the path had run past) and put a gravelled area at the back, for a log store, storing the bbq and somewhere for Frank to load/unload the defender. Probably not sounding too cottagey but we are practical people!

I then spent a week to-ing and fro-ing between the two nurseries (definitely NOT garden centres) that I am lucky enough to have within quarter of a mile of the house, bringing back probably ten car loads of plants. Seventh heaven.

The pics are of the beds after about a month. I threw in some petunias to give a bit of colour to start with while everything got established. You’ll see I have loaded the plants up – I can’t bear bare soil and it keeps the weeds down and the cats off!

Over winter, I’ve pruned everything back so it doesn’t get too overgrown this summer and looking at these pictures, I can’t wait for all the shrubs to come back into leaf and flower. There’s one bit of the bottom bed that hasn’t worked out as well as I’d hoped, mostly because it has inherited plants in it, that I was reluctant to get remove (I passed any healthy plants I didn’t want on to friends). But I’ll probably just leave as is. We’re hopefully moving this year or next and it seems a bit of a waste as it’s not a part of the garden we stop and linger in so I can cope with that!