Work in Progress - Return to Kev's Garden

Has my persistent ranting about the weather and threatening to abandon horticulture encouraged the gods to relent a little?  To show just a tiny morsel of mercy to this poor gardener in her hour of despair?

Perhaps not today; the rain pours down on the roof of the lean-to greenhouse as I sit at the computer trying to concentrate on three projects at once and finally settling to this one, but at least at the weekend the sun shone and real work happened on two of 'my' gardens.

The first job was a return to my first ever garden for someone else, namely my friend Kevin. 

Kev's garden looked like this when I first went to tackle it last autumn.  You can't fault it for eco-friendliness, but it's not going to pick up an RHS Gold Medal any time soon (unless we can fool them into thinking there's a 'concept' in there somewhere, perhaps?)

By the time I had finished with it, it looked like this:

I think you'll agree that was much tidier and it had the added advantage of making it easier to find where Kev's deadly cats had dropped the rats they catch and kill, and of course to spot anything else they deposit.

And now, with the perennials having grown up and filled out and the digitalis just past their best, it's looking like this:

You can't hear the bees buzzing from the picture, but I assure you, they most certainly are!

I'll need to do a bramble-busting session next time I'm there and root out a few dandelions, but the overall effect is the wild-life friendly, largely self-caring plot I had hoped to achieve.

I'm also sorting out some pots for the front and back paved areas.

At the front, which is dry and sunny (please note that this is in the North Staffordshire sense of 'dry and sunny', meaning 'has occasional days when rain does not fall for the entirity of a 24 hour period and there may be glimpses of blue sky between clouds), it's herbs and sempervivums. 

The safety boots aren't a decorative feature, by the way; they're to stop me slicing my toes off with strimmer cord though arguably were this to occur, it would make the purchase of conventional footwear more straight-forward.  I can't remember if I've treated readers of this blog to my various tales of shoe-shopping woe, but if on review I haven't, I'll be sure to revisit the subject in due course.

At the back, which is currently not looking particularly photogenic, it's to be ferns and ivies to cope with the shade and damp and, much though it's bad form to speak ill of a loyal customer, inevitable neglect.

I also made some further progress at Ford Green Hall on Sunday afternoon, but I'll do a separate post about that in a day or two.