Landscaping

We have lived in our house for more than 40 years.  There have been times when we thought about selling and moving somewhere else but here were always very good reasons for staying put.  So we did.  I think we have now become so deeply rooted here that we will only move out in boxes, or to places halfway to our boxes.  In all those years there has been only time when I have made an effort to redesign the back garden.  Granted, there have been tweaks from time to time, but only that one complete redesign.  The time has come, or is fast approaching, for me to find paper and pencil once again.

Our back garden - and it is the back garden with which I am the more concerned at the moment - slopes down away from the house.  There are steps down from the house to the garden and then, a third of the way down the garden, there is a steep bank with more steps.  This is why I talk about the top lawn and the bottom lawn. The bottom two-thirds is divided into two parts, the part nearer the house being grass and flower beds while below the fence is what has until now been the vegetable garden.

The top garden is bordered on one side by our garage and consists of a kidney-shaped lawn (although the convex side is really just a straight line) with flowers and shrubs on the concave side.  The straight side has a narrow border between it and the paved path and between the path and the garage is a flower bed.  Our next-door neighbour has a number of trees which overhang this part of the garden and there is a pear tree just at the top of the bank to the lower lawn.  This encouraged me to try recreating a sort of woodland glade here, with the aim that as one walked down the garden, different plants would come into view.

We descend three steps under an arch covered with honeysuckle to reach the bottom lawn.  I shaped this with a sweeping curve from bottom right to top left, halfway along which was another short, curving grass path leading under an arch to a gate to the vegetable garden.  Various shrubs were planted alongside the fence separating the bottom lawn and the vegetable garden with a vigorous clematis scrambling along the fence and over the arch - which has a climbing rose on the other side pushing up through the clematis.  There is an apple tree with daffodils beneath and a bench facing the setting sun.

This all sounds very English country garden; I just wish it looked as good as it sounds.

As I said - or implied - earlier, the whole shooting match was designed so that a person walking down the garden would encounter new plants and flowers and different views while progressing in either direction.  But what I want to think about now is the view of the garden from both the kitchen window and the bedroom window.  The Old Bat has not been into the garden for several months now.  Granted, the weather has not been inducive to it, but I really don't see her getting down there much if at all in the future.  So I need to ensure that what she sees is better then what we have now.  The shrubs in the bottom garden might perhaps need to be taller than at present while I could think of more pots planted with colourful annuals around the top lawn.

I shall need to give this matter some more thought.

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Surrenden Road, Brighton is a suburban road with a difference.  It is a dual carriageway for much of its length with a wide swathe of grass down the middle.  Horse chestnut trees line the verge and the centre grass, trees that are allowed to reach their full size, like this one.