Flâneur Gardening

>The weekend before Easter I finally got my act together and got started on my long-planned turf wall that will form the back of the raised hedgerow towards the road.

Cutting turf

I started out by cutting the outline of the strips with the spade and then undercutting them by sliding the spade under each strip about two inches down, and the turf behaved exactly as I had hoped for; the grass roots had a dense fibrous texture that held the strips nicely together even when handled in a rather rough manner.

Carting turf

I started out by cutting a barrow-full of strips and then carting them down to the hedgerow, but after a while I realised it was probably as quick to just carry each strip down there and putting it in place at once, so that was a pretty good work-out, considering that each strip probably weighed in at around 30-40 pounds.

Stacking turf

Building the retaining wall was easy, considering that I come from the country that invented the Lego bricks… Sure, my little wall wasn’t perfectly level or straight, but it was fairly sturdy, especially once i had staked it with bamboo for every foot or so and added some horizontal lengths of bamboo canes between the top layers to keep it from being too wobbly in the middle of the straight sections.

The result

The wall came up to about 16 inches, and then I started pouring in soil and stuck in “weeds” from around the garden. Poplar shoots from the lawn, forsythia off-shoots and whatever else I had at hand. I felt rather accomplished (and aching) once it began taking shape, though the photo above only shows the half-finished result.

I went up to the garden with my husband and my mother-in-law for the beginning of the Easter days, so on Maundy Thursday my husband and I created one more section of raised hedgerow to the right of this picture, meaning we have now made a good attempt at creating a living replacement for the missing sections of fence. Also, we poured on more soil in front of the raised bed I’d made and planted his birthday presents (two viburnums and a white lilac), so the entire hedgerow is now 5 meters by 1.5 meter.

This sort of planting is where our heavy clay soil really comes into its own; first of all it is formidably heavy to move about, and secondly it holds moisture very well, so even after 5 days of sunny weather with temperatures up to 20C / 70F the soil was still moist just under the surface. This means that even without watering, these plants should have a pretty good chance of being happy here.

It does, though, seem a bit like we’ve created our own little version of the Dannevirke… This earthen rampart will, surely, keep the German emperor from invading our little plot of land, should he ever wish to.