Miss a Garden Party but Create a Garden for a Party!

Instead of going out to what sounded like a great garden party yesterday I listened to my Mum and put some effort into my own garden. Last weekend the garden started to take shape with the pop-up patio and the planting. In truth there were two pretty good parties after both lots of work.

So this weekend the job of painting the back wall had to be tackled.

The path now leads from the concrete area through the new evening sun-trap patio. I laid the path with flag stones and bricks that I found in the garden and laid on a base of soil. Once they have had time to settle I will lay them on sand put some mortar around.

I’m really pleased with now having a wall looking more sanitised than satanic! I still wonder if I could have had a more washed-out  white to hint at the real colour of the bricks, but it’s a difficult task to pull off at such a scale.

The garden is now a much more welcoming place with the scope to paint the back wall with some kind of scene and maybe do some more planting against it.

The idea of growing a hydrangea was mentioned as was a clematis and roses – all of them framing a door which leads into a another garden.  The view below gives an idea of the size of the wall… What does anybody think?

 

I reckon I would need to ask the owners of this house what they think about the whole surface being covered with some big frieze? They also need some sort of access to their roof in case it needs repair… Does anybody have experience of this?

Popup Patio and Pottering About in the Garden

Back in Autumn 2012  the garden was piece of grass with a Fraggle Rock insect adventure park in one corner and a very crazily-painted red wall behind it. There had obviously been some good garden parties in the past as the crumbling table and chairs were still out… There was also a realy good Bay Tree and apparently very high quality soil.

A satanic garden back in October 2012

Since then there have been some big horticultural developments with assistance from Bob Mole Gardening. Once the excavation started and we started to find out who lived here in the past there garden has had some sunflowers, sweet peas and now a pop-up patio.

Garden from upstairs July 2013

My very own handiwork was the creation of the pop-up patio – which happened over the course of an hour today. It’s not quite big enough yet for a table to sit on it, but it’s good for two people to sit and enjoy the last of the sunshine.

Popup Patio Polaroid!

The garden will develop over time so it’s good to try some silly ideas, like putting a mirror against the wall. Maybe it will bounce some light back up on to the plants and make them grow more quickly?

Sweet peas captured in the mirror

The next stage is probably to think about what happens to the red wall in the future; it’s a little overbearing and it probably needs to be repainted in a lighter colour. There is some thought about maybe painting it to look like an entrance into another garden; maybe paint the top half of the red bit to look like a trees with a door in the middle – a bit like Frances Hodgson Burnett’s book The Secret_Garden

Guessing lives of previous residents… #1 the female gin drinker

Digging up the garden has revealed some interesting hints about previous owners of this house. It will be fun to put together some character profiles; so here goes with the first one:

#1. The female gin drinker

A few weeks ago a small Gordon’s gin bottle was found under the lawn and then over the past weekend some of her bright pink Revlon nail varnish emerged from the soil.

Lilac Champagne by Revlon

It’s hard to tell how old this bottle is, but it is pre-1980s as it has no bar codes on it and there is a message on it saying not to fill beyond the dotted line… Did people used to mix this stuff themselves? Did our gin drinking Romilly Road Resident maybe put a slice of lime in there as well?

Some research on the Revlon website circa 2013 reveals colours called ‘flirt’ and ‘plum seduction’. Life was clearly much more simple back then – take a colour and add a kind-of-exclusive drink. There must have been a ‘Black Guinness’ or a ‘Blue Martini’ nail polish!

The search now starts for more clues about this woman… maybe it’s worth lifting the floorboards as there’s stacks of rubbish down there too!!