How many gentle flowers grow in an English country garden?

Fear not as I am not going to start singing this old English folk song, let alone do the accompanying Morris Dancing.

I’ve written before on my love of gardening and it was the garden here that partly inspired me to move in when Covid was starting. Back then the garden like the house was a total mess , hugely overgrown and half covered in concrete.

Not having much and often any money, I’ve concentrated on getting rid of the perennial weeds in what was essentially once a forest. Every time I dug them up, 75% of them would come back within a few weeks but now having dug it all op 7 or 8 times, finally I have got at least a good chunk of the garden under control.

Bit my bit I have been planting it up with flowers and shrubs. Some from cuttings and donations. Not all survive especially given the heatwaves, harsh winters recently and the hurricane in spring.

Now is the first time it is beginning to resemble a nice garden especially as when a neighbour came in my garden, he felt so bad it was completely in the shade due to his oversized tree, that he gave it a very needed pruning. So now I get more daylight in, things have a a chance to grow and the new lawn that partly died has risen from the dead after I planted it with seeds in the spring.

Only the garden at the end of mine has owners who are at all into gardening which means mine is always under attack from ivy, brambles and other assorted weeds.

I’ve also been busy digging up and cutting down 2 or 3 old, dead and dying bushes. One of them 20 feet/7 metres or so tall. They look like they had been dying for years and several of the main branches just snapped off in my hand as they were so dead and dry. With all the recent fires due to the heatwaves and drought it also makes sense to get rid of them.

Because they were so dry and dead I managed to cut them down into tiny sections and got them all removed by the council in the regular waste collections, even though doing it this way takes a few weeks it still saves money.

For example in this spot it gives me a whole new area of the garden which has just been waste until now. As you can see from the ornamental grasses, all of the existing plants are in entirely the wrong positions. I have no idea what the previous owners were thinking, nothing about the garden made any sense but slowly I am getting it into shape.

As an added complication, there is a large solid something under much of my garden, it is possible an old WW2 air-raid shelter as the garden 3 houses away still has theirs in an overgrown clump of weeds.

I don’t actually get to spend any time in the garden really. I’m always busy and the only time I’ve sat outside all summer was when we had 30 seconds of a very light shower of rain at the end of May. I do though like looking out to a nice garden and spending 5 minutes every morning or evening just going to the end of it and back.

It’s becoming home to a huge array of creatures: mice, voles, frogs, butterflies, bees and other insects, bats, a whole manner of garden birds, the odd bird of prey and more than a handful of green parrots. If they are happy then I am happy!