A Well, a Long Border and the 'Peanut' bed 
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All's well that ends well


The well in front of the house looked a little purposeless, so Will found  this wheel on eBay and we hung baskets from it, and put earth in them and hessian pockets in the segments. I didn't think it would take quite so long to get going and I'm still waiting for the convolvulus and cirastium to tumble down the side but you can see in this 2020 photo that it's getting there. Amazingly, at the back on the left is a cotoneaster which is growing out of a crack in the stones!
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A new Long Border


Originally this was a  wooden fence that went up to one of the many leylandii hedges that our predecessor had put in. Once we took the leylandii out, it was just a fence going nowhere, so I planted Rosa Glauca along it and it became the dividing line between the garden and the Veg garden.



Eventually, because I felt that this end of the garden didn't have enough going on, I decided to put a 2 metre wide border in front of the hedge. Lots of advice from Alex Davies and I ended up with a plan to have five repeats of the same design, each separated by another rosa Glauca - see below: (I imagine this makes more sense to me than you)





Here it is, dug and half manured. The pink is Clematis Hopleys Pink which is meant to weave through the Rosa Glauca but always grows too quickly before I do the weaving. I got this idea from a garden in Stockbridge called The Buildings. The garden was owned and created by Gillian Pugh and is one of the most imaginative and beautiful gardens I've ever seen



​And here it is, planted up. Unfortunately I haven't been able to find enough Artemesia Lactiflora Jim Russell so some of them will have to be added next year. 
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Now we just wait for it all to grow!




​It looked lovely in 2022 but annoyingly I don;'t seem to have taken any photos. The scabious have been amazing, as has the Salvia Amistad. My planting plan ignored the Spring so I've put in a lot of Exotic Emperor tulips and some pulsatilla. This photos give you some idea of how the bed is coming along.





The 'Peanut' bed - so called because it's shaped like an unshelled peanut 



When we arrived this wasn't a bed, so much as an area of vaguely cultivated earth which had the only growing shrub of the garden in it - a viburnum. Initially it was the place that I planted things people gave me or plants I'd inherited one way or another and still to this day it's a little haphazard. You can see below the leylandii, looming in the background
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​In the photo below you can just about see what it was like when we'd removed some of the leylandii. There were still a couple of trees in the middle of the bed which had to be accommodated although one of them has since died.
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By April 2015, the initial planting was done although a lot of what I put in either didn't work or wasn't happy. 
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It wasn't until 2018 that I thought the Peanut bed was starting to make sense. By this time I'd introduced a lot of white foxgloves which have become a unifying feature of the border. Other plants include Kolkwitzia Amabalis 'Pink Cloud, Cistus and Geraniums Magnificum and Rozanne. In 2020 I planted a lot of antirrhinum White Giant which, from a distance looked like the foxgloves and went on flowering well into November. 


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​In August 2020 I took out a lot of plants and introduced some others eg: Stipa Gigantica, Romneya Coulteri, Annabelle Hydrangeas and I worked at making the back of the border more interesting because it's a place where I often sit. Below you can see what the back of the bed was like in 2022.

And here's the front of the bed, in late Summer 2022. Thanks to a leaky hose the Hydrangeas have thrived and the dahlias had their best year ever. Café au Lait and Engelhart's Matador. Also lots of gorgeous bronze day lillies.