Gardening

As it's a bank holiday today in England and Wales I did the traditional bank holiday thing of pottering in my garden. It means so much to me to actually have a garden to potter in! As I'm only "borrowing" this garden for a little while until our new house is built, I don't want to change much. So today it was just a bit of late spring tidying and potting up some container plants that are pictured above.

When my parents visited yesterday they took me to Homebase and I picked up a lavender, fuchsia, sage and a thyme plant which I potted up today. (Pictured above) They may look a little small at the moment but I'm sure that in a months time they'll look more than comfortable in their new pots!

My back garden is small and south west facing, the soil is good, the lawn poor and everything is a bit over grown and wild, as you can see above. (Although that picture was taken after I had done some tidying!) I quite like that though as I like wilderness gardens and wild flowers, like the foxgloves pictured below. So I am leaving the back of the garden semi wild, which the birds and insects will enjoy, particularly the bees who need all the help they can get!
The border to the fence was completely overrun with herb-robert, which is pictured below. The flowers are a pinky purple, the stems red and in autumn the leaves turn scarlet too. The herb smells very strange too, particularly when disturbed, apparently it's a good mosquito or midge repellent and has many old traditional herbal uses from curing sickness to disinfecting wounds. So I've only cut it back to half way up the garden. The back of the garden is set aside for the herb-robert to run riot. It gets lots of bees visiting which is good.
Near the kitchen door though I want to keep the border neater and more tidy so I did pull the herb-robert back. It has shallow roots so is easy to remove and from looking at advice on the net it won't grow back once dug up though when the remaining plants seed later in the year it could come back. I've had to stake the rather pathetic rose that was being over run by the herb-robert. I think its supposed to be one of those climbing or rambling roses but it wasn't so much as rambling as just lolling! I've added a campanula which I'll add too I think. I also transplanted some plants from further along the border, so we'll have to wait and see if they take.
The birds seem to have appreciated me turning over some of the garden and generally rummaging about through the plants, sending the insects scurrying about.

I'm yet to start on the front garden, apart from adding a hanging basket and sorting out a rather ungainly rose out there too. I'll take some pictures of the front in the week when I go to work on it. I'm glad I made a start today though as there's a lot of rain predicted for tomorrow!