Mum loves gardening and so whenever they joined us at Clacheranmor it immediately becomes her task. I'm not sure if her heart rose or sank at first. The garden covers about a third of an acre and needs a huge amount of work. It is a good size and has loads of potential, although there will be some challenges to overcome. The house, of course, sits on a large hill, and so the garden is on a slope. It is a gentle slope in the centre, angling sharply at the top and bottom. This means that we can use this gradient to create interest, for example some terracing, rockery slopes and steps. Water runs off the hillside and at the moment the garden has a drainage channel around the sides to keep it away form the house, but we love the idea of channeling this into the small pond to enlarge it and then to keep it topped up through the summer.
Mum and Dad's initial mission was to remove all the moss from the paving slabs, weed a couple of the best looking borders and trim some shrubs. They worked round the driveway pulling weeds, unblocking the drainage channel and generally tidying round. The biggest task was to remove all the wilted, slimy gunnera leaves. One of my least favourite plants, I was glad to see it tidied up, but amazingly, by the end of the week, it was already a foot tall again!
I still don't have much of a plan regarding the garden, except to tidy it up a bit and make a bit more out of the side garden, which is almost all covered in nasty, featureless gravel. We need to take out a few features like excess fencing and one of the compost heaps, move some of the lovely plants from the bottom of the garden that slopes down to the road, so that we can actually see them and, finally, install the lovely granite fountain bowl we brought from Erica Drive. In an ideal world I'd like to divert some water off the hillside to keep the pond filled, but in reality it would be a huge job when a pond liner would just do the trick well enough. Here is an online graden design screenshot of the current and the potential future. It doesn't go as far as the Japanese moss and zen garden of my dreams, but perhaps one day...
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