Flooded garden ...

I have just realised that in April I will have lived in my house for nine years....

Previously I had  a three bedroom Victorian terraced house with very large rooms and I had a lot of furniture.

My son and his friend helped me move in and put the beds together so that at least we had somewhere to sleep. Charlie has the biggest room and at the time I had two single beds, so I slept in with him for the first few nights until he got used to it.

 That evening I sat on my back door step and viewed the garden with such dismay....it sloped down to the house with a path of large cement slabs down the middle...there were no plants...the grass was a muddy mess and the fence was just awful...a low chicken wire fence with grey cement posts. My furniture was stacked all in the wrong places and I knew I would have to part with many things in order to fit into this tiny two up, two down.

I sat and sobbed...

 

That first summer my father dug up the entire garden...he levelled it into two parts...dug me a border at the top, edged it all in bricks and re turfed it for me...it was really lovely.

Three years later it looked like the photo above.

It kept flooding so I dug up the grass on the lower level...raised the whole level by a foot and put down crazy paving on sand...it still flooded killing off many of my plants...we dug a soak away filled with a ton of pebbles...we put in a pond and my dad made the seat with trellis for me. I dug down about fifteen inches in the left hand border removing sack fulls of clay and re filled them with compost... and I built them up about ten inches.

 

I fenced the garden last year but bad weather stopped us from putting up the last panel. During the winter the fence started to lean backwards as I do not think we used enough cement.

On Saturday we dug out around the posts and added more cement pulling the fence upright and put up the last panel....I am so pleased... you can not imagine how much...at last it is private. 

There are buds on the apple tree...This is royal gala grown by Charlie from a pip..

 

 

I have raised flower beds at the top of the garden....they are made from an old wardrobe.

This is my washing line post which really bugs me...

 

 

I cut some plastic covered wire trellis and wrapped it around the post.. I planted some ivy to grow up the fence...

 

 

And....I bought this wonderful...evergreen clematis armandii.

 

It says...it grows six meters up and across....with scented white flowers in March...April and May....

This is when I wish my mum was here as she knows what she is doing....I very carefully planted it and unwound the leaves that had wrapped around each other and the supporting cane....I only broke two!

This should grow up the trellis and hide the pole....then along the cane trellis I made that adds height to the fence to obscure the view.

 

I have three other clematis growing up the back fence...also a honey suckle and Jasmin....They are climbing up bamboo canes that form part of a trellis I lashed together last summer.