OUR GARDEN is the theme for this week

 

FINAL WEEK OF DAILY PHOTOS – NEW PLANS FOR THE FUTURE!

At the end of this week, on Saturday 24th October, I shall have reached the milestone of 200 daily posts entitled “A Photo a Day Helps ….” on a range of weekly themes. I started posting photos every day soon after Lockdown started in the UK due to the global Coronavirus pandemic.

I am grateful to those of you who have shown your appreciation in various ways and to all those who have been faithfully ‘following’ my Blog. Some of you have been following me from the beginning, when I posted my diary from Uganda three and a half years ago. And some of you, from all around the world, have started following in the last few weeks having somehow stumbled across my site. To old and new followers – thank you. This is what encourages me to keep going.

During the past 200 days, I have appreciated going through so many of my photos taken over the past 15 years since I got my first digital camera – wonderful memories and exquisite nature. And it has been a great way for me to put some of my photos together in themes other than countries visited or holidays, and keep them safe somewhere in the ether where I can always access them.

I’m not stopping because I’ve run out of photos to share – far from it! I have thousands more stored on my computer from which you’ve been spared! However, it has been very time consuming to search and sort and sometimes research extra information.  And I’m sure some of you could do with a break from getting daily emails filling up your Inbox, telling you I have posted yet again!

But this is not the end of my Blog. I will still sometimes share photos with you, but usually only when I have visited somewhere or in response to “Challenges” put on by other Bloggers, such as Cee Neuner’s Flower of the Day and Lisa Colman’s weekly bird “challenges” which I haven’t always had time to respond to.

I also want to do a few more written blogs, such as a series I will post soon on “Do We Need to Talk About Dying?” and other occasional reflections. So please don’t go away!

So, for this last week, I will share some photos with you taken in our garden.

I will first set the scene before showing you photos during the rest of the week of some of the flowers and insects and pond life we’ve had over the years. The garden is constantly changing and evolving, partly by design and partly due to nature taking its course. No two years have looked the same as plants have come and gone and we’ve changed the landscaping a bit as well.

We moved here exactly 20 years ago and found the garden in a bad state, overgrown with grass and weeds, a few bushes and tree stumps, and one medium tree. The soil is solid clay, liberally filled with bricks, lumps of concrete and other builders rubble from when the houses were built eighteen years before. It is L-shaped and less than the size of a tennis court.

Through our first winter and spring, we worked hard clearing it, planning where we wanted the flower beds, soft fruit and ‘dwarf’ fruit trees as well as a bank, a little ‘stream’, pond and bog, two raised beds and compost bins before digging out half metre deep trenches. We put the clay and rubble into a large skip and then filled the trenches with a lorry-full of topsoil, ready for planting. We also had to remove eight Leylandii tree stumps whose roots went far under the rickety fence into the neighbours’ garden, so the fence needed replacing. I made use of circles in the overall design to give different ‘zones’, marked by edges of flower beds and stepping stones.

Fortunately, we were 20 years younger then!!

 

General views of different parts of the garden over the years.