garden progress

I don’t know if I expected my garden to look more finished in our fourth summer of living in this house. I know some gardens look very finished at this stage but ours doesn’t. Some gardens probably have spent much more money from their owners’ purses than ours has, and have employed professionals planning and planting which ours hasn’t.

I made a garden plan before we moved in but we had practically no time to anything according to the plan until the first summer which was after a little less than a year’s worth of living here. There have been several things slowing down my garden work, one of course the pregnancy and first year of our semi-demanding youngest child. Others reasons include occasional lack of garden enthusiasm although that probably isn’t very significant.

In time of a sudden desperation of never-getting-anything-done it is good to remind myself of the state of this garden four years ago: There was a sandy desert in the middle of weed fields. There was construction rubbish scattered everywhere around the house: pieces of timber, broken tiles, curved rusty nails. The nowadays most used way to the main entrance of house was part of the weed field. There were no garden plants anywhere, just those that grow here naturally, and the latter being dominated by high grass.

Since then we’ve build the way to the main entrance nice and firm and formed many other parts of the plot to their current state. We have laid a stone retaining wall, founded and sown a thick lawn for ball games to be played on it and planted dozens of small bushes to slope parts of the plot. There are crocuses, spring lilies, daffodils and tulips in several parts of the plot. The meads have been taken care of, some of the plants weeded, some moved to a better or more suitable place to grow in.

A huge amount of work has been done every year. My garden plan has changed over the years. Most of all I’ve added to my plan elements based on ideas I’ve gathered by keeping my eyes open whenever going anywhere from the garden of our own. I’ve browsed and read gardening books and magazines in Finnish and in English. I’ve taken pictures of beautiful English gardens on our trips there.

At the moment our garden looks like a Finnish country garden – that is it looks like a garden, not a wild forest. I have still so much to do about it to even partially meet my plans that I dare not to make a full list of things to be done. The-English-garden part of our garden so far only lives in my thoughts and dreams, there are not even lists of plants or illustrated plans of it. But it will be there one day. Until then I’ll just keep digging and weeding and planting and planning.