The Bare Bones of my Garden

This is the time of year when I can see the bare bones of my garden and I relish it. The two areas of lawn, with beds around them, are based on ellipses with a path winding through to the far end of the garden, but once everything grows up in May and June, it becomes harder to see these shapes. I like, too, that I can see the brick of the walls that surround the whole garden and the curved lines of the climbing roses trained onto them, before they become hidden behind foliage. Shrubs and trees without their leaves have a bare beauty about them and are easier to assess for how much cutting back they might need once they have flowered.

The beds in the middle of the garden, edged with grey granite setts and with a little path through the centre and along the back, are just a fuzz of low green in spring with allium leaves, forget-me-nots coming into flower and upright stands of the lime green Euphorbia wulfenii dotted through them. I like the sculptural shape of the green-oak bench that sits under the old apple tree: the tree has a charm of its own, as it leans across the garden.

These days it doesn’t fruit much and so has become a support for ivy that grows around the trunk - I have to trim it back a bit each year before the birds start nesting so I don’t disturb them - large bunches of mistletoe and a Rambling Rector rose that pretty much covers the tree at its crown. I am never sure whether the increased weight of the rose will, one day, bring the old, decaying tree down in a storm, or if the vigour of its roots and two-inch-wide stems will actually anchor the tree in place for a few years to come.

The lawn at the back of the garden gets a lot of shade from overhanging trees and so is damp and mossy: getting the grass to grow is difficult. When a few primroses self-seeded there and looked so lovely with their pale, spring flowers, I decided to go all out and added plug plants to turn it into a primrose lawn where the moss provides a soft green backdrop to these pretty, woodland plants. These are gradually seeding and taking up much of the “lawn” I have finally accepted that the muddy track through the middle of it, which is Finlay, the cocker spaniel’s running route through the garden, will never recover, so I am spreading bark on it to create a little woodland path.

I keep the lawn nearer the house conventionally short and don’t generally give much time over to maintenance – there always seem to be so many more pressing jobs to do, but this year I am having to give it some TLC. I’ve been digging out daisies and other “weeds” that are starting to take over at the expense of the grass  - hence the patchiness of it in the picture at the top of this piece – and feeding and seeding to try and green it up and get back to a reasonable sward.  

I have also been pruning and training. So many of my trees and shrubs were encroaching on one another and thus needed cutting back at the end of last year to allow each of them to “breathe” properly. I find shrubs and trees always look so insignificant when first planted and it’s hard to imagine they will ever fill their slot. Then, as if by magic, they find their feet and seem to suddenly get much bigger, outgrowing their space and shouldering adjacent plants into cowering below them. Remedial action is then required to keep them all in check and give everything sufficient light.

A Viburnum opulous ‘Roseum’ – better known as the Snowball Tree, is spreading out and up and eclipsing a white camellia, so it had a hard prune last year and will need another, once it has flowered this year. The large holly that is in my neighbour’s garden was starting to overshadow a dwarf lilac and I had to take the hedge trimmers to it in February.

I have several lilacs – some of them the very fine and dainty Dwarf syringa, others are varieties of the larger Syringa vulgaris. One of these is being overshadowed by a large hazel in my other neighbour’s garden and growing at a slant to get enough light. I need to seek permission to saw off some of the hazel branches to give it a bit of freedom.  

The Amelanchier lamarckii I planted next to the green-oak bench is getting bigger every year but for the moment is not causing any issues – you can see it behind the largest Euphorbia, about to come into flower. I have a beautiful winter flowering cherry near the house whose blossom always cheers when little else is happening in the garden. It is a great tree for a small garden as, even when it gets bigger, the branches are relatively fine and leaves small so it doesn’t shade too much.

Then there are the roses – I have many. Each year the climbers and ramblers need pruning – in some cases a lot – along with training and tying in against their walls and supports, to tidy them up and prepare them for the season ahead. When I prune the shrub roses I bend each main stem as low as possible and tie them onto hooped hazel supports . This gives maximum flowering because it stresses the plant slightly and buds will break all along the stem. Because this winter was so very, very mild here – we only had one or two short-lived frosts, many of the roses are already in full leaf and are harder to get into shape. I should have started sooner!

The next job is staking – clumps of perennials that currently look so benign will, in no time at all, have grown up and out and start flopping all over each other if I don’t provide their supports now while I can.

I’ve been feeding the beds with fertiliser and spreading garden compost on the borders and bark chippings in the wilder areas, to neaten everything and keep the weeds down. I just love it when everything looks this neat! It feeds my need to feel in control, if only for a short while, before nature completely takes over for another year

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