Okay, so it took me a while longer than intended to get around to the next post. Apologies for being such a tease, but I'm finally hear to tell you about the joys of scaffold boards and the many things that you can do with them. Why scaffold boards, though? Well, you'll have to go back to an earlier post for the full story, but the short version is that I had some leftover scaffold boards I'd been using inside the house, and couldn't get hold of anything else.
I managed to source some more scaffold boards to complete my cunning plans, but before I get into that side of things I need to talk about a rose. More particularly, the significance of the rose and why it has to take pride of place and to be such an important part of the social area.
Several years ago, my mother died unexpectedly - well, unexpectedly for us. She'd known it was coming for a while, but hadn't made it common knowledge so when her cancer finally got the better of her it was a huge shock for the whole family. A while later, once we'd all started to come to terms with our loss, my aunt gifted us with a rose to commemorate her. This was before I had any real interest in gardening but thankfully my wife took it upon herself to look after it.
Here's the rose in question when it was a baby
So we get this rose, and it goes in a pot, and for the next few years my wife keeps it alive. We know nothing about it - not even the type of rose it is. Could be a shrub, a climber, a rambler... no clue at all. It's not a prolific mass of flowers, but it's in a nice big pot and it gets plenty of water and gets fed regularly so it keeps on ticking over without ever really looking like it's going to explode into growth. Eventually, we end up shoving some sticks into the pot and with a little bit of something to cling on to the rose finally started to show what it was made of. We figured it was some sort of climber because it was happiest with a bit of support and we were rewarded with tons of beautiful white flowers that keep going throughout most of the year.
Much happier and healthier with a little support
So, coming back the garden itself, we had a rose that was of special significance, and my wife and I both knew that we wanted it to be a part of the main social area of the garden. We also knew that we wanted it to be a significant feature - something that would attract attention. I also knew that the benches were only the start of something in that regard, and that I was going to create more planters using the scaffold board.
So, taking the scaffold board, I knocked up some big square planters to go in the corner of the seating area. I had the idea of one being up near the house with a smaller one next to it, and one in the opposite corner on the same edge for symmetry's sake. They were very simple to construct - four lengths the same size screwed together at right angles, and then another on top of that with the overlap in the opposite direction and repeat until you get the desired height. Then I used a staplegun and some leftover pond liner to line them, leaving the bottom open for drainage since it was going to sit in the corner of the gravelled area.
I still had several boards left (damn you, reality, for making me change my initial plans) so I also knocked up a dining table as well - literally a case of four lengths of scaffold board with two strips of board underneath to hold them together, and four steel legs I bought online that screwed into the corners. All of a sudden, we had a well-defined space with the same wooden planters on the corners and for the table and the benches to unify everything.
All of the scaffold board additions (Original Size Image)
Oh, and in the background you can also see a small coffee table and chairs that my wife uses in the mornings where it catches the first rays of the morning sun:
Here's a better look at the coffee corner
That took a little while to sort out, but it was basically a case of de-turfing the area, putting down a weed membrane, and then using some of my leftover flags to go on top and form a surface. I then stole some gravel from the main area to edge it to tie things in a little more. Long term, it might expand in size a touch, but my youngest still uses the space between that and the main area for gymnastics and her air track and so on, so I couldn't encroach into that too much at this point.
As you can see, the rose is very happy in the planter
These days, the rose flowers abundantly and is covered in white flowers for much of the year until the weather gets too cold for it. The eagle-eyed might also have noticed the post in the background of that as well as some sticks coppiced from a lilac but that's definitely a post for another day.
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