Mass planting gaura on the oak bank

Something creative at last. I was thinking this winter that I feel I have done seven years of non-stop designing and planting. And now it is going to be maintenance from here on in.

But actually this is the last area in close proximity to the house which needed work. This is the oak bank, the sloping terrace above the courtyard.

I had built up the soil in three thin beds and tried to mulch the weeds as much as possible. It is a bank which is mostly composed of granite rock with a thin layer of topsoil.  I have tried some oak trees to complement the large oak to the left of this planting area. But they grow about a centimetre a year. Or die.  It’s a tough environment.  So I decided to go down the route of simple plants that can take a dry and thin soil.

And instead of going shopping I went sowing.  Seeds harvested from plants already in the garden.  There comes a time when you don’t want to spend more than the cost of potting compost to create new garden areas and this is definitely a cheap garden design.

Just eragrostis curvula grasses and gaura shrubs.

And here are the 114 little gaura babies that came out of the potting shed where they have languished all winter.

You can only pick them out when they are in their black pots.  If all goes well you will see a gaura hedge this summer. And a flow of grasses. I will try and plant them out tomorrow if I have time.

But I suspect I will have to attend to the thin strips of grass and weeds which I have left between the three beds. Mulching alone might not control the weeds.  But I didn’t want to have a huge dust bowl of bare earth here.  Now that the gaura are in, I might have a go at weed control. Or just head into the forest and collect a zillion sticks to chip.  Choices and potential dilemmas. We are coming to the end of the dormant season and weeds are going to burst into life any day now.