The front got to grow up first!

Like all terraces mine has a small front garden which to make life easier for the previous occupants had been gravelled over. This meant when I moved it it looked nice and tidy but I soon came to realise that the weeds just saw it as a challenge - the rosebush was a haven for ukky yukky insects and there were much nicer things that I could do with the front.

Christmas 2006 I had made the foolish error of putting the ex christmas tree onto the gravel where it dropped every single needle onto the gravel.

So I found a house on a property website and 'borrowed' an idea to turn the front garden into circle with plants around the edges, this would involve scraping up all the gravel, raising the cement slabs and building a brick edged circle. With the front being south facing the plants which went in had to be able to cope with scorching heat as well as poor drainage and occasional drunkards, not to mention the cats. And slugs.

See below for a picture of the work in progress - and the japanese cherry I chose for the shady corner.

And this is the finished article, after about a week, I'll post another picture of it soon to show how it looks now.

Start at the very beginning

Two and a half years ago I bought a terrace house which had a delapidated and very run down space outside the backdoor which vaguely resembled a garden. It did have a washing line and it did have a shed, it had some grass and an apple tree which was (almost) dead, it also had a raised area which could be described by a particularly nefarious estate agent as a 'patio'. In short it wasn't really my idea of a garden, looked far too much like trouble and besides, it was winter and I had bigger problems like the fence falling down & me having to tie it to the shed to avoid its total collapse.

Having bought the house i had no money and having moved from furnished rental accomodation I had no furniture either. The house had 'potential' but was very far from luxurious and having completed on the 14th December I spent four of the coldest months of the year sitting on beanbags, sleeping on a campbed and generally stretching my imagination just as far as it could go as to what i could do once i had some money. This use of my mind led me to do foolish things once the money started to flow again, namely that I could make these changes all on my own.

Add to this a Masters degree and working full time and you get the picture - the garden was not getting a chance to grow up. In October 2006 I met my partner and time was even more precious with the MSc in second place, and the house becoming third priority the garden was very much in fourth place.

However with a new job and a new outlook on life I want the garden to have a chance to grow up and be a garden, last years clearing of hoax patio and the old outhouse buried in the garden have left it looking bleaker than the burger section of a supermaket freezer on a hot bank holiday weekend!