Border Issues
Posted By Judith on 21st May 2018
No I’m not talking about Brexit and the difficult Irish border debate, this is about a troublesome flower border.
It’s the long one along the side of the lawn which has always been a problem. I’m sure back in the day it was beautiful, however in later years Gladys was unable to keep up with things the way she always had and by the time we moved here in 2014 the border was out of control.
It wasn’t so much weeds, more the existing plants running riot and growing into each other. Some were even growing up through the lawn, making the likelihood of a nice straight edge with the grass impossible.
It wasn’t high on my ‘to do’ list in the beginning so I didn’t get round to tackling it until last Spring. I dug out, split and relocated everything from daffodils, bluebells and snowdrops to tulips, Solomon’s Seal and a purple plant I didn’t recognise.
It took all year as I had to wait for things to come up or die down (a bit like ‘Whac-A-Mole’, only with plants) and was very hard work, but by last Winter I was pretty happy I’d removed everything.
How wrong I was. This Spring when I was looking forward to planting in a blank canvas and sowing some grass seed for a straight edge I was faced with lots more plants appearing in the wrong place. Good job I hadn’t been clearing a minefield!
And so I started to clear it once more. Things were going well until a few weeks ago when I was struck down with a particularly bad back, I could barely walk from room to room never mind dig a flower bed.
I was in a right pickle. Broad beans and sweetcorn were in need of planting out and the final vegetable bed needed digging properly so it wasn’t even ready for them, something had to give and I decided it had to be the flower border.
Fortunately I’d already removed all the plants (again), but it still needed digging properly. That simply wasn’t going to happen given the state if my back, so I just raked the soil into some kind of acceptable level and planted 8 Dahlias from Wilkos (£1 each) and 5 Hollyhocks from the local garden centre (£2 each).
As I’ve said before my history with Hollyhocks is poor, they usually die, but Peter persuaded me to give them another go. Also the labelling at the garden centre was a bit random, so although I’m hoping for 4 yellow and 1 red, I could end up with something completely different, only time will tell.
My back is slowly improving and at least I’ve got the broad beans planted now, but here is part of my current ‘still to do’ list.
The flower border can now go one of two ways. Either history will repeat itself and the slugs will decimate everything I planted, or they might all thrive and turn into a colourful and vibrant Summer border in the coming years.
For the moment it looks like this
scruffy, drab and uninspiring, but watch this space. Hopefully it will soon look as good as this colourful display in the drive.
A girl can dream can’t she?
After all nature is a wonderful and beautiful thing. (Poppy)
