Lockdown DIY inside the house meant that I'd pretty much burned out in terms of effort. I had a month or two to take stock, see where things were at, and enjoy what was in place. In general, the garden was taking care of itself pretty well. The perennials that I'd planted were doing well, and we had established some initial structure in the garden to make it into a usable space.
We'd put some pots down the side of the patio/gravel area but they weren't quite enough of a borderline, and we realised that the seating area at the bottom by the pond just wasn't getting used at all - it was basically in the shade, too cold, and too far away to be of interest. We didn't need it, and it wasn't being used, but the main patio area got a lot of use so it didn't matter too much. We did start to plot about what else that area could be used for, though.
May saw naked gardening day come and go (I'll spare you the photo, for decency's sake) but I managed to get a few plants ordered from our friendly local lockdown delivery service and just generally keep on top of things.
Some more hostas, an azalea, and one or two others to fill things out a bit.
The pond, though, was establishing very nicely. The frogs had obviously been busy.
Dirty buggers. Tadpoles everywhere.
The left-over scaffold boards were playing on my mind, though. In my head, I felt like the gravel/patio area needed a little more height at the edges between the lawn and the bed in front of the pond, and you can never really have too much seating. The obvious answer was to build some benches.
The benches were very simple, and suddenly the areas felt a lot more distinct
Yeah, that's what they needed. Now that there were places that you couldn't go, it meant that there was more of a journey involved. Apparently, a garden with a journey is a good thing. All I know is it felt better, so I called it a win.
A bit more of the leftover scaffold board was used to start a bigger planter to hold the rose. There's a bit more significance to the rose which I'll explain in the next post, but it was important that it has an important and emphatic place in the garden. I thought that a planter on the patio would do nicely, and I thought that the trial placement and sizing worked well. I didn't quite have enough wood to finish it at this point, and I was unable to get more at the time, but I wanted to try the idea out for later. I had a few other ideas for scaffold boards, so I knew I'd buy more later on anyway.
The next month or two saw some of the flowers emerge, and some interesting wildlife started to show up. Aside from the now expected frogs and butterflies, there was an unusual visitor that seemed to be obsessed with the buddleja:
Forgive the zoom, but as I got closer the little bugger flew away and this was the only photo I got
I'd never seen a hummingbird moth before, so to have one just turn up was incredible. Sadly, I only managed to get the one photo and I've not seen any since, but it wouldn't surprise me if I've just not noticed or been around at the time as they're very quick little buggers.
This little fella seemed very curious about me, too
I was also followed by a birdie who followed me around for a good ten minutes for no particular reason. There's a robin who shows up who similarly holds no fear of humans, either.
The rest of the year went by fairly quickly between the return to work and my in-laws moving nearby. In fact, the useless seating space at the end of the garden became host to my mother-in-law's pot collection as the rental place they moved to didn't have a garden, and as such they didn't have the space. Having a luton van full of big pots turn up on the doorstep was an interesting experience, and finding homes for over a hundred pots was something of a challenge but the delivery boys and I rose to it.
This is maybe a third of the pots that turned up.
We had to temporarily move the table off the patio to accommodate these. We also filled the area the shed was in and most of the paved area by the house with pots. In time, we moved some pots over to the in-laws' new place, planted a few pots out, and shuffled the rest about to make things fit as best as we could. Otherwise, we saw the year out with little more excitement than a bout of isolation for my eldest daughter thanks to a school-mate testing positive.
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