Summer has arrived and some very welcome rain in June helped the new front garden to get established, but the generally dry weather has meant that we have still had to water the new lawn occasionally to make sure that it gets through the first summer.  Once it has bedded in for a full year it will be much more resilient and we shouldn’t need to water it next year.

The herb garden is now properly established and it is a real treat to be able to just step out of the front door and harvest whatever we fancy.

Herb garden 19 August

The flowers that we put into the front border as a stop gap while we work out a long-term structure benefited from the wet June and the subsequent sunshine and are now a riot of colour.  The sunflowers are an interesting short cultivar called Teddy Bear and these and the Gaura provide a backdrop to the assortment of orphaned Dahlias liberated from the allotment.  In the background you can see that the crab apple has settled in well.

Flowers 19 August

The ripening crab apples do however signal that even though the sun is still shining, the days are getting shorter and autumn is on the way.

Crab apples 19 August

In the back garden the landscapers started work in late July.

Diggers at the ready

Clearance was pretty quick and by the beginning of August the patio was starting to take shape and we were really pleased that the builders had managed to save so many of the old slabs for us as we had an already aged look to the patio.

Emerging Patio 1 August

As per the plan we went without a lawn and have used permeable self-binding gravel to separate growing areas and by mid-August the framework was just about complete.

Nearly there 18 August

Back garden 19 August

The first job will be to get the saved plants (in assorted pots) back into the ground.  we will then do the bulk of the planting in the autumn once the weather gets cooler and damper so that new plants will be under minimal stress, but the soil should still be warm enough to encourage good root growth.