Winter's duvet

The garden slumbers under a 6 inch white duvet this morning.  Only the lumps and bumps of plants and garden structures provide reference of what lies beneath.

Heavy snow rolled in from the south west yesterday and layer upon layer covered the garden.  Dean Hill to the south looks Alpine and the fields surrounding us stretch out like crisp linen sheets into the grey haze.

The branches of the trees are scratchy dark lines against the pale subdued sky and all signs of work carried out last weekend, creating the new western beds, is hidden from view.

It's a time to rest up and take stock.  I can only hope the thaw comes soon and I can get out into the garden again and continue my checklist of tasks.  But for now the order of the day is a hot chocolate and a thick woolly sweater.

Hard labour

Like most people occasionally life's cares and woes lay heavy on me.  My remedy is long periods of repetative, systematic hard work in the garden.  In recent weeks I have focused these labours on the lawn on the western elevation of the house.  I confess that I have held off starting work on the creation of new borders for this part of the garden, along with a completely new planting plan, because I dreaded what I might find under this lawned area.

In Summer this lawn dried out quickly and never looked healthy.  We had poked and proded the lawn and in large areas the fork had hit something solid just beneth the surface.  But in recent weeks I had decided to bite the bullet and get on with what I knew would be a long and very hard task in creating and preparing new planting beds.

I excavated some test pits and straightaway hit solid concrete.  Out came the pickaxe and fortunately I was able to smash my way through to find chalk beneath.  So clearly this was not the base of an old garage or some such structure.  First task was to strip the turf.  Crazily areas of the lawn had been laid on top of an area of concrete.  My assumption is that this was some kind of temporary work surface that the builders had used or even part of an access drive to the rear of the house.  Either way, breaking up this area took some time and a great deal of effort.  Then it was onto the breaking up of the whole area of former lawn with fork and pickaxe. 

Eventually the area was cleared and large amounts of compost laid to prepare for the planting.  I have used the old trick of making the paths wider at one end and narrower at the other to create the cheat on the perspective which appears to make the paths look longer.  This new area of the garden we have called the western beds and over the next few weeks we will start the process of planting them with a variety of plants creating a different colour pallette to the rest of the garden.  It is an important area as it is the first sight you see when entering Ordnance House.  It also creates a new line of sight to the Orchard Room on the far side of the garden.  But for now it is time to recover from the massive effort put in during recent weeks.  The planting will be the easy bit!