>This is what the garden looked like when the snow disappeared in January. Down by the white birches you see the Ugly Fence; brown, ramshackle and really not very attractive, but on the other hand providing a great coverage from the road outside.
And this is what it looked like when I arrived up there a fortnight ago, one week after perhaps the most severe storm this winter:
The fence posts at either side of the fallen section had come completely loose as well, rocking back and forth in their expanded holes, and the section itself had been twisted enough for the frame to crack in two places. It could be fixed, but I’d probably rather do it with another set of hands, so I removed the section entirely.
Then when I came up there Friday, this is what I saw. You see one section leaning at a perilous angle, another propping itself up against a birch tree and the third has opened up like a large gate, ajar into the garden.
The picture below shows the status quo. Only the two end sections of the fence remains, their posts still standing firmly in the frozen ground, and they will go, too. The posts may or may not be left there as the bases of two trellises on either side of what will become our hedgerow.
You can see the road in the photo above, only sheltered by a low row of thorny bushes. Clearly we need more, much more, to guarantee our privacy. Below is one of the tricks in my bag; poplar shoots that have been allowed to grow in a part of the lawn since June.
In that short time they’ve reached just about one meter in height, proving that poplars are indeed fast-growing trees. There is a total of 20 of these small poplar shoots, and they will form the back-bone of the hedgerow. They will grow tall enough within a reasonable time frame, and though they are quite transparent they will be beefed up by climbers like sweet peas and maybe even hops. (The poplar is one of the few plants whose vigorous growth would probably be able to keep it from being strangled by the hop.)
To get a head start on the height we plan to use some of the surplus soil from the drainage digging in the lawn to create a “rampart”; a raised bed for the hedgerow so it can get perhaps an additional 30-40 centimeters before even growing a new leaf. And… This is something I’m really excited about; we obviously want to have the planting higher towards the road, slowly decreasing towards the garden and merging into a bed of tall perennials, so I’m thinking I might cut loose some of the grass from the lawn where we want to make beds and use this turf to build a retaining wall towards the road but on the inside of the thorny bushes.
Cutting the turf one spade wide and 4-5cm deep should give me a sturdy building material for the wall, enforced by stakes that bind the layers together and anchors them into the ground. By the time these stakes have rotted away, hopefully the turf will have settled and formed a solid wall that will have no trouble in holding back the soil, especially as we’re not talking about a very high retaining wall.
Also, turf walls? People built houses out of turf walls, and part of Hadrian’s wall was built from turf. I love this. I love the idea of trying my hand at a building method that has been used for thousands of years. Even at this early stage of planning/dreaming I feel a sort of connection, not dissimilar to what I feel when I start a fire to keep warm or when I pile stones on top of each other on a fell-top to say – in an old-school language – The Flâneur was here.
God, I love dreaming! Especially when the dreams are simple and obtainable, like building a turf wall.
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