A before and after garden design case study, and more easy planting ideas with a 5-plant recipe
Plus: excellent summer colour from a love/hate plant, tips on how to keep cool, and another summer booklist
It feels like a proper summer. The summer that you’d read about in a book, whether it was The Famous Five of The Go-Between. The warmth melts right into us as we potter slowly round the garden, and pottering slowly is very definitely the way to take the next couple of days. Embrace the heat Italian-style - more of that in a minute.
It’s another smorgasbord for you this week as I couldn’t choose between all the things that I wanted to tell you and have totally failed in narrowing it down:
There’s another 5-plant recipe, to add to this one, this one, this one and this one.
There’s a garden design case study
I’m taking a look at a bullet-proof plant which is absolutely loving this weather - but it’s one of those plants you might love or hate
I need to tell you about a terrible crime
Another perfect pairing of plants
There’s a blackbird update
And the wild corner in my garden has burst into summer glory - if you haven’t got one, make one
If you’re new here, do have a look around The Gardening Mind’s home page as you’ll see lots of subjects at the top of the page - one of them is the Small Garden Design course which you can also get to by hitting this link. You might not want to follow a whole course, but if you want to dip in and out of it, it covers a range of different elements which, once you’ve got them under your belt, might change the way you look at that garden spot which has really annoyed you for ever.
Here’s what we’re looking at today - do you have a garden or garden area as uninspiring as this?
It’s bad, isn’t it? But I promise you, magic can be worked - quickly.
Let’s take a look first of all at what’s really bad:
The fence - bleak
The retaining wall - a horrible diagonal that doesn’t relate to anything
The dots of lavender looking so sad
That gravel area in the top right-hand corner with two hopeful seats - would you ever go and sit there?
It’s generally bleak, forlorn, and desperate.
Transforming this garden was, though, quite simple, and on a tiny budget too. Take a look now at the below photo of the ‘after’, showing what this garden looks like today - and here’s how I did it: