Extending the Dry Garden

I can’t tell you how pleased I am to have this glimpse.

Just that.

An upright wooden fence in the far distance through the dry garden.

Or am I calling it the Dry Garden? Way too pretentious. This entire farm is a dry garden.

But I have been irked by the shape of my fence for ages. And after a whole year of being irked I have done something about it.

When you stand on my brand new beautiful deck outside the office you look out onto this narrow dry terrace bank.

And it has been the wrong shape ever since I installed the fence.

Too tight on the bank – more like a belt than an enclosure. And of course it listed almost as soon as it went up.

I need one to keep out the deer and the wild boar. But mainly the wild boar. Now that it is well established, it’s hardly a juicy source of food.

Woody plants galore.

This bupleurum fruticosum is a beauty. flowering all summer long.

But I doubt it’s tasty.

Now, let’s not get distracted by vegetation. We are talking fences.

Here’s a picture from way back when… 2018?

We had to leave room at the end of the terrace under the pine tree for extra parking. And I suspect I didn’t have enough fencing material to place it at the bottom of the slope.

2018? Gad that was a long time ago. I seem to recall that was another very dry year and I was being pestered by not just deer and boar but a badger family who were digging for anything they could find. So the fence when all the way up the slope above and over the top.

I had to scroll way back to the end of April this year just to find a note of my intentions to fix the darn thing. And it started because I found I had an excess of the excellent chestnut fence when I installed the one above the orchard. (After the horse incident.)

I dragged it up here to the dry garden…. and somehow managed to ignore the project.

Isn’t it marvellous how you can resolutely avert your gaze from a job for months and months on end?

But now it’s done.

The upright posts have been thumped into place. Lower down the bank and the whole garden now extends to the huge pine tree.

Here is the ‘before’ shot of what the future garden will look like.

I think I have gained 25 extra square metres of space. We need to leave a space under the pine for parking. And I really don’t need to increase this garden out to 100 square metres. Think of all the propagating of hardy shrubs that would take!

Right now I have to start plotting how to extend the garden. Lots of sticks and branches to mulch and build up the level.

Weeding. A fine autumn job.

And then planting. It is mainly rough grass here at the end beyond the fab cistus shrub.

And in case you are baffled… I secured a few spare chestnut stakes to the horizontal on that gate at the end. Because nothing is more annoying than opening and shutting these rustic fence / gates and finding you snap the connecting wires and it all goes wonky.