Flâneur Gardening

I have a plan for the garden. Honestly, I do! However, at present it exists only inside my head, and the last plan of the garden I drew up was the first summer we had the garden and the holiday home, so it’s rather outdated now:

The Ambitious Border now reaches almost down to The Ugly Fence – with the inclusion of The Puddles – and the rose patch was discarded and instead there are now roses a bit here and there in the garden. The Temporary Nursery was a holding pen where plants could live until I got the borders ready for them, so that has now reverted to lawn, and the rectangular flower bed on the South-West side of the covered terrace has turned out to be the semi-circular Sunny Border.

And of course there’s the last addition, the Lawn Bed, which is filling up quickly with roses, soft fruit bushes and a spot reserved for perennials as and when I acquire them. I don’t know which, but I’m sure any perennial will be prettier than a stretch of lawn. (And okay, MAYBE I’ve already hoarded some cheap perennials as roots, so they will go in the ground when spring arrives and should in time be able to fill out the blank space.)

Add to this the beds and borders that do not yet exist – except in my head – and the garden is pretty much under control. The Lawn Bed, for instance, is only half of a grander scheme to create a line of flowers between the hedge/shrubbery and the lawn proper – but with a narrow-ish grass path behind it to increase the feeling of depth and provide easy access to the back of the beds. There will also be a narrow grass path between the lawn bed that I dug out last autumn and the second lawn bed that will be a visual extension of the first and might end up merging with The Woodland Patch.

This weekend I’ve let the Flâneur Husband go up to the garden without me – but with a couple of his friends – and they seem to be having fun with card games, red wine and a chain saw…

Flâneur Friend in a tree

We have a row of pine trees towards one neighbour and from our side they look rather dull – and from the neighbour’s side they look downright ugly while also blocking their afternoon and evening sun… So down they will go, and fortunately the neighbour has some lovely mature trees that will be our new view, so we too will get something prettier to look at. Win-win, I think, especially since cutting down those pines will give more light to the hedge (a pink spirea of sorts interspersed with cherry plums and hawthorn) so it might grow a bit taller.

I’m not entirely sure how many trees they have cut down yesterday. It might be one or two. Either way, it’s a start! And it will open up an area of the garden that we never use, so perhaps a new plan should be made for that area. There is already a pear tree and an apple tree a few meters from the hedge towards that neighbour, so I might add the plum tree my Mum will be bringing over later this spring. (She bought it for her own garden but then decided she wanted another variety so I’m getting an 8ft tree for free!) It’s beginning to sound a bit like an orchard, isn’t it, so maybe that’s what it will be. I’ve always loved fruit trees for their mix of the ornamental and the tasty, so more of them, please!

So plans and hopes and dreams. What a gardener does while the snow is still on the ground, right? It seems like I’ll have another couple of weeks to plan and dream, sadly, and while I don’t want to moan about the weather I do wish it would turn more spring-like soon so I can get cracking with the planting and weeding and everything else that needs doing.