The Dry Garden dilemma

Welcome to Stop Prevaricating Tuesday.

I am on holidays. Sneaky glimpse.

There is a beach not seven minutes walk from this dining table. There is a 20 metre swimming pool even closer…

But no. Work to do first.

And if I told you I have spent the last ten minutes trying to do this blog post without my usual giant screen and finding the paragraph button… pathetic.

You find me hunched over a tiny screen. But determined.

And I am so appalled at my lack of discipline last month. So here goes.

I created this Dry Garden because it was a dust bowl. A sad and parched space that for a few years you could pretend was a lawn.

But in reality most years it looked like this.

A wan excuse for a ‘garden’.

So a few years ago I went at it with a mattock to break up the dust and decades of compressed earth and did this.

And then this.

And I must say that it has been a fantastic success.

Rich dense planting of drought tolerant shrubs. Knitting nicely.

Of course there are some duds.

Artemesia, anyone?

This is the innocent looking silvery plant right here in the foreground. Next to the lavender.

And here ruining the colour scheme with the too fluffy silver white in among the felty greens.

I planted so many irises around the damn plants just to hide the blocky profile.

And what you don’t see of course is its winter ‘plumage’.

Quite. Bloody eyesore.

So spotting some foliage breaking much lower down the woody stems I went at it very hard indeed.

Gawd. I might regret that.

But if it doesn’t revive I will grub it up and replace.

And that isn’t even the dilemma I wanted to mention.

As you saw from the dust bowl shots, this is a poor piece of very free-draining land. Barely soil over granite.

But over the six years of creating a rather thriving ecosystem of plants.

The worms returned.

And with that lovely worm casts on the surface and a gradual enrichment of the soil.

Every landscapers’ dream.

Except this is meant to be a dry garden – never watered, never fussed over.

Let the phlomis and stipa gigantea self-seed and delight in the euphorbias taking over the space every Spring.

Love my euphorbia rigidas.

But it means more time weeding. More time than I have to spare.

And if you creak down onto your knees in this part of the garden and peer very closely at his graphic shot of BROWN DIRT..

You get the picture. Don’t say I don’t spoil you with dull shots.

This is a whole ecosystem of lovely stuff I just don’t need.

So naturally I ‘harvested’ as much of the worm casts as I could and will be using them diluted as a drench for my potager. But I am having to reconsider my planting scheme here.

Dare I say it? Plants that thrive in the magical formula – rich free draining soil?

Meanwhile. It was more a matter of trudging off to the potting shed to find a replacement garden fork and trowel rather than continue with a hands and knees weeding.

I lost my favourite one in the great re-landscape project at the end of the pool bank…

Oh great. More dull shots of brown to come.