The Gardener's Rest: February's End

As yet, winter has been mild. There has been very little snow, and even less sunshine. It has been the wettest winter on record with many places being flooded across the country. There has been a fair amount of activity in the bottom garden however. In October our lovely friends bought us a Himalayan Birch tree so we created a bed especially for it using the bricks found in the garden.

Vine eyes and wire were attached to the fence panels which were treated in late summer.

Autumn brought a bounty of material to add to the compost bins, with a great many leaves to bag up to create leaf mould.

And then the best part of creating a new garden - the plants. We bought two winter jasmines to cover the fence on the shadier side of the patch at the bottom of the garden.

And three New Dawn climbing roses. The idea is to create a seating area to be able to drink in the scented pink blooms. We chose New Dawn for both fragrance and the name has a special meaning to us.

The apple tree gave us a huge harvest last autumn and the unknown variety of eating apples were delicious!

We've hard pruned the evergreen honeysuckle as it was pretty much out of control. The deciduous one on the right of the arch has been tidied up and the new shoots tied in. There is a clematis here too, which has also been tied in - hopefully to make a better display this year.

Then came the major job of the winter. Clearing out the bottom garden of all the builders rubble that was dug up when creating the Birch bed.

There was also an awful lot of junk left behind from the previous owners.

Wasn't sure the binmen would be too pleased if we tried to dispose of all the rubbish and bricks in the wheelie bin, so we hired a skip. By the end of the week this was full!