I’ve taken this picture standing at the back door. This is the whole garden and it measures 11 metres long by 6 metres wide. We look out onto it from our conservatory kitchen/living area all year round.
The back garden today
I thought I would describe what is planted in the garden, starting at the edges with the fences and moving inwards through the borders to the pots.
It has wooden fencing on three sides and the trees beyond the fence belong to gardens that back onto us. Those gardens are huge and very long so it looks like we have woodland at the back. A few metres away they become Queen’s Wood.
The fences are clothed in greenery. The back fence is a huge ivy of some kind which gives a green wall and nesting for birds. The right hand fence is jasmine from next door, ivy from next door, Virginia creeper in there somewhere, honeysuckles, and a struggling winter jasmine that hardly flowers. Our big old magnolia flowers on its east facing side for my neighbour and hardly bothers to flower on our side.
The magnolia coming into leaf
On the left is a lovely old fence held up by greenery. There’s a massive tangle of clematis Montana, pyracantha, ivies, honeysuckles, Virginia creeper and jasmines. The old apple tree gives us blossom, shade and the odd apple.
The garden faces north and the areas close to the house are shady. The far end is hot and dry. The rest is that enigma the books call “sun/part shade”. The pond is the size of two dustbin lids and possibly too shallow for much aquatic life but we have frogs and dragonflies and water in a garden is always a good thing.
Pond surrounded by old pots
Next time I will describe the planting in the back garden borders but in the meantime here are some photos taken today.
