Photos from today

Sunshine at last and out in the garden for the day.  

At one point this afternoon Ken was making a brick edge, I was weeding and dead-heading, the chap who cuts our lawns and his sidekick were doing their job and two chaps from New Bank arrived with a tree and two trellises.  Talk about excess.

I took a few photos at the end of the day and added them to the Garden 2012 album.

I'll just pull out a couple.

A friend very kindly gave us some 'bricks' which Ken spent a very hot couple of hours hammering into place.  The idea is that the gardener now doesn't have to do a vertical strim which means I can get plants to the edge and over the bricks without having them decapitated.  I can also add soil behind them to give me a better amount for planting in. This is needed as the edges round the wall are very poor. 

Next year I intend to plant a smaller version of the half circle perrrenials all around the house edge.  I will be looking for a short yellow daisy, small day lilies, small crocosmia, small geum.  Suggestions welcome?

Not looking too terrific yet but it will fluff up nicely next year.  Newbank are in my bad books though.  I bought six plants from their three for nine pounds table (which is extortionate in itself) only to be told when I got to the till the liatris wasn't in that deal.  This meant I paid full price for all three of my six plants.  The only option was to take them back and find something which was in the deal - how you do that when I thought I had already done that, I don't know or just abandon the lot and leave.  We had friends waiting for us to get through the hellish queue in the first place I could hardly subject them to another wait and I wanted something as I had already stripped out the strawberries ready to plant some perrrenials.  They were exceedingly ungracious about it, clearly implying I was trying to pull a fast one, which really annoys me.  Not only am I pernikity honest about such things but I have spent untold thousands of pounds with them in the thirty plus years I have been going there.

To compound my disgruntlement... I paid the required sixteen pounds to get a tree and two pieces of trellis delivered and they arrived with the wrong trellis!  Right style...wrong size.  Not exactly rocket science you would think.  To be fair they brought the replacement very quickly.

This is a picture of the tree in its pot waiting for its new home.  It was a dry as a bone!!  It is only a simple Rowan or Mountain Ash - Sorbus aucuparia.  Good for a small garden as it only makes about 15 feet and is tough as old boot.