Winter landscaping

I love how I call this ‘landscaping’.

It’s just a poncy way of stating that I went up to the oak bank to do a bit of weeding… and ended up sorting out an almighty mess.

I looked up from the endless raking of the courtyard mulberry leaves to see that the oak bank could do with a bit of love.

The iris leaves were all brown and ghastly. And I knew that closer inspection would reveal all sorts of horrors.

Plus I wanted to check and see if any of the dozen gaura plants I grew from seed survived the summer. I did rather forget to water them all year.

Three. Tenacious little beasties. I need to sow more this spring.

I have now shoved a bit of a wire cage around them to stop them getting buried or bashed while I work.

Wow, you probably didn’t need to see a huge close up of the mess.

From the front irises. Annual weeds in the path. Shaggy eragrostis curvula grasses on the rows behind. It’s a long thin strip of a bank.

But from below, what you don’t see is this.

A teensy long strip of sloping soil (and thuggish weeds) right at the front.

I used some old beams from the dismantled bread oven pegged down to try and hold back gravity from sliding down the bank. But I never did make use of that thin strip.

The drop below into the courtyard is bracing. And it’s a bugger to weed.

So a mad idea took hold. (It was mild sunny winter weather and perfect for a crazy warming scheme.)

What if I crouched right on the edge of that drop and dug out the excess soil and took it somewhere else?

Note my little helper snoozing in the sunshine under the oak tree while I worked.

I thought the soil could go into one of the raised beds (three terraces lower down) to build up the levels.

It’s a bindweed free gift of good-ish soil.

The peril. The back ache. What a mad idea.

And then what to do with the next season’s ingress of unwanted weeds? I dug as far down to the rock as I dared. Hoping the wall builders of centuries before had done a sturdy job. I was crouching rather close for quite a few hours.

The solution? Cover the whole thin strip of rock with plastic (I ran out of weed proof fabric).

And then weight it down with rocks. And try and make it look pleasing. It is a part of the garden one really only seeds from below.

But I didn’t want a single peep of plastic on show.

I know. Just putting these ones delicately on the edge took an effort.

I tried rolling them gently down the slope hoping they would land on the plastic.

And spent way too much time swearing softly as they bounced right off and onto the gravel. Narrowly missing a parked car.

So the only way was to wheelbarrow them up to the wall and clamber up that granite rock and place them in situ.

Time lapse photography.

Way too many rocks. But I kept on hiding and hiding the fabric. What I should have done of course is just let the soil be and have an elegant row of stones and spend another few hours each week weeding.

And you know and I know that with a garden this size, it ain’t happening.

You can’t see how much of a rubble pile it is from below. Unless you are seven feet tall.

So I call that a win.

When my back stops screaming I will go up again to cut back the grasses and weed in between the next three rows.

But that’s easy as can be now that the landscaping is done. And I’d best see if I still have some of the gaura seeds.

In a good season it looks like this. But I need a succession after the brief iris flowering.

Gawd, I need better shots of the flowering. This makes the bank look titchy, and it’s a massive expanse of inhospitable dry gardening.

Even bulbs struggle. And you have trouble seeing them over the tops of the tall grasses.

Note to self in spring. Work a bit harder.