In due course the autumn of Year 1 arrived, the Virginia creeper turned crimson and COVID restrictions banished all social events to the garden – requiring the acquisition of a firepit. Logs from the local hardware shop were supplemented with some of the ‘trunks’ of ivy that I had cut down which, somewhat startlingly, went off like fire crackers. This was our second try and as you can see Ralph looks distinctly nervous.
Boris, meanwhile, decided that under the firepit looked like a nice cosy place to hang out, until even he realised that his fur was getting scorched and headed out rather quickly.
However, even we were not hardy enough to light up the firepit when the snows came for a few brief days blanketing the heath, Beechwood, the garden – and Tawny Pipit, my wire foal who had trotted up from Lawn Road with me.
With spring came the sun. The azaela I had brought from Lawn Road obviously decided it needed to make its mark in this new garden by producing a riot of glorious flame coloured blossoms –
the apple tree ignored the builders and flowered profusely –
– and the first digger arrived. It job was to remove the rest of the ivy from the ramshackle wall which separated me from my left hand neighbour, to remove the wall itself and to start levelling out the garden.
Removing the wall revealed a very tatty bit of plastic net fencing with wiggly supports and exposed the trunk of the holly tree which, alarmingly, seemed to have self planted itself half way up the bank.
Fearful that by removing the ivy we had removed its support I summoned the tree man but he reckoned that it had dug itself well in and was going nowhere. None the less, we did then bank up a good deal of new soil around it which has left me with an interesting hot dry bank to plant.
Whatever wild and woolly charm the original garden had possessed had now definitely gone but that did not stop us entertaining – even in the rain. After all, what are umbrellas for?
While the digger got rid of the wall and the ivy on the left hand side of the garden, I got to work on the wall at the back of the garden which separates us from Mr Usmanov and Beechwood.
More enjoyable ivy hacking revealed that the original wall that starts in the left hand corner at just under 5 foot high slopes downwards across the back of the garden. It was obviously deemed to be too low at some point, so someone added further height in a rather nasty yellow brick taking it up to around 20 foot at the far right hand corner of the garden. On the advice of the lovely garden designer, Clarissa Judd who I had by now recruited for general advice purposes, I got some special stone paint from Germany. This has at least has toned down the nasty yellow to something like the dark charcoal colour of the original wall.
The other downside to removing the wall of ivy at the back of the garden is that, with it gone, I can now see Mr Usmanov’s garages and offices. They are not unpleasant brick buildings but I would much rather not see them. So, at Clarissa’s suggestion, I planted a small mimosa tree on my side of the wall which hopefully will bush out and conceal most of the buildings from view. It is hard to see in this image but it seems to like it and is going well.
Meanwhile, since I couldn’t contemplate a whole summer without being able to at least get out in the garden, I gathered together the many pots that had come from Lawn Road and made a few early morning trips to Columbia Road flower market to create a little flowering oasis in the chaos. A centrepiece of half a dozen clustered pots of annuals around a little olive tree, surrounded by my random collection of tables and chairs interspersed with whatever other pots I could muster – grasses, fuschias, curry plants, sages – anything as long as it was lush and, ideally, flowered.
As always, the non stop begonias excelled themselves in a riot of glorious golden yellow –
only rivalled by the purple sage.
And so passed the summer of Year 2………
Managing the Tormented Heath