The Front Beds
I wanted to create a mown meditation spiral in the front garden but, as the space is only about 20 foot wide, the spiral became a small circle of grass surrounded by tall planting that enables you to be immersed in the plants. Each year the sweet peas are grown here for maximum sensory effect. A natural pathway leads you on a journey around the front garden with two large beds and a border that runs along side the mixed species hedge.
There were no two ways about it, the conifers had to go! I had originally thought to keep them, but the dark nights of my first winter in the cottage, I found looking out into the 'black' terribly claustrophobic. From the front bedroom window you can see right to the lighthouse across the Moray Firth, but from the front window you couldn't see anything and it was freaky.
Starting with the loppers in winter to avoid potential nesting I gradually took these two trees down, finishing with the bushman saw and the following year I took a chainsaw to the brushy growth at the base. What a difference, there was light and more importantly - space. It also created a natural pathway between the two trees.
The spiral became a simple circle of grass surrounded by planting. The plan is to put a seat into this area, as if I ever get time to sit and enjoy the garden.
This bed seems to keep getting bigger, which is no bad thing. The wider the bed, the more planting! It is supposed to be all blue and yellow and in 2019 was somewhat over run with Mecanopsis cambrica and Calendula with the odd digitalis popping up and a rather pink aquiligia. Later in the year the orange crocosmia and white of the leucanthemum take over the baton. With the open day in mind the bed has had some rejigging done and there is now monarda and a giant fennel in there too, so while the year may start with yellow and blue it will finish in a blaze of colour.
Along the path from the gate to the front door there was an area of grass that had naturalised daffodils in and looked lovely every spring for a while, then it was just a mass of daffy leaves dying back. I planned to turn this small strip into a wildflower meadow where poppies and cornflower and corn cockles would come up after the daffodils. Well it just didn't work! Despite strimming the grass, or rather scalping it, throwing down a wildflower seed mix that included yellow rattle, the following year the grass came up stronger than ever along with the dockens and nettles!
I had already made a small half-moon shaped bed and decided after the meadow disaster to just enlarge the bed all the way back to the path. It would also give me the change to remove the annoying stone that poked out of the grass catching the mower. That stone turned out to be a bloody great boulder! Try as we might (yes I had help for this one) I couldn't get it moved. We managed to get it to the surface and back filled underneath and now it sits in the middle of the bed and was named the 'Rock of Gibraltar'
As I wasn't 100% sure what I was going to put in this bed, I sprinkled a packet of poppy seed 'Purple Fizz' as a filler for this year. The bed was absolutely full off poppies, but they were all varying shades of red, and in October, when I put my hand into the pocket of my gardening coat, I found the packet of Purple Fizz seeds, unopened!
