Day 115 - Spawn, spraint and exploitation

I wasn't just working in the Rose Garden, of course, and had been pruning and composting and tidying all over the garden as well. By early February I had managed to take it to the next stage, with the paths in place and the beds manured and mulched ready for planting. In this one you can see that I had by now completely removed all the overgrown shrubs from the bed opposite, by hand with a mattock, opening out the aspect completely. Now the space drifted off shapelessly to the right, but I had a solution for that pending -

The photograph shows the lovely part-composted mulch of woody chippings through which I intended to plant the Roses and the Verbenas which would cover the ground between them. I had already dug in some finer home-made compost below that. I have a number of photographs from different angles to show how it worked, but I don't want to overdo it and bore you, so there follow a few too many, rather than my default choice of far too many. The first shows the connection of the area to the orchard beyond -

The second shows that I had not lost my enthusiasm for pruning climbers, with the purple vine on the right of the house and another Wisteria on the left. The vine had been a complete tangle, with all its foliage hanging down from the top, before professional intervention gave it back its self-respect, as far as was possible with an inauspicious start -

That's enough of that. Two weeks later I had attended to the nasty bed on the lawn, by creating a cuddly new bed further to the right, which when planted would hug the South Lawn tight and embrace the view from the Terrace. I levelled the old bed, then lifted the turf by hand from the new bed and relaid it over the old one. Net cost - zilch, apart from a bit of hard labour. I also removed the feeble trees from the lawn and cleared the bed at the rear of its nettles and wonky tree, all by hand. Look at those bungalows -

But it was starting to look proper -

At the same time, I had taken delivery of some plants and had planted the bed under the Mulberry on the main East Lawn, which was now looking much better, with the ivy cleared from the feature walls behind and from the tree itself and the ground around it. Here I was going for shade-tolerant plants which would thrive under the shade of the Mulberry -

Looking good, if juvenile.

Simultaneously, I had not been neglecting other time-sensitive duties, and had taken the pond from its somewhat overcrowded blanketweed infested state -

to a much more open appearance -

Note the hedgehog ramp on the left, to prevent accidents to thirsty wildlife. The frame over the top was so I could drape netting over it to stop the heron getting all the fish. It didn't work, and it turned out that the problem wasn't a heron at all. We had otters. A bit of netting wasn't going to stop them, so I gave up with the fish. Lots of frogs and toads, though, whose spawn the Director used to pinch for his own garden, which I thought was a bit cheeky. Making babies in my garden wasn't a private enterprise. I bit my tongue, because I was enjoying the job.