This month has been devoted to hard landscaping. The west side of the house was originally a concrete terrace of sorts with an outside loo and some old slate paving outside the kitchen. The whole area was looking decrepit and there were random piles of broken stone and weeds all over the place. The contractor, Carl arrived in the first week of July with a digger early one morning. I was sitting on the kitchen step having a cup of tea when I heard the sound of the digger coming down the drive. Then I watched while the driver tried to negotiate getting the large digger past the side of the house outside the kitchen door without tipping the machine into the wooded gulley and stream below. It was a very close shave.
The power of the machine was shocking. By the end of the morning the front garden was unrecognisable. Vast mounds of earth and stone had been swept aside effortlessly and deep trenches dug to form the foundations of the wall for the new terrace. Then there was the pond to be dug. By the afternoon, I had come to see the digger as an object worthy of worship. What would have taken weeks of back-breaking work by hand with a pick and shovel was accomplished in less than an hour with this machine. The hole for the egg-shaped naturalistic pond was carefully and skilfully sculpted out of the ground. Over the next couple of days it was lined with butyl rubber and then filled with water from the borehole. But since it was already getting towards the end of summer, I would have to wait until next spring to complete the surrounding paving and soften the structure with water and bog plants.
The next day it poured with rain. The trenches for the foundations of the supporting walls filled up with water and the whole site turned into a swamp. The effect of the rain was no joke: it held up any further work on the terrace while the now ‘building site’ turned to mud. To make matters worse, right at the end of the job, the digger had also touched the main electricity cable to the farmhouse so the electricity supply to the property was turned off as a precaution until the work on the terrace was finished.
However, between the downpours, I did manage to plant out most of my precious seedlings into the herbaceous border to the south of the new pond: over one hundred verbena Grandularia bonariensis, several types of ornamental grasses and lots of verbascum along with day lilies and delphiniums. I also planted a bamboo and a white tree peony towards the back of the border along with two large shrub roses which I had dug up from the edge of the old terrace, before the digger had arrived on the scene. Of course, my delicate delphinium seedlings of D. siberica were instantly devoured by slugs as I could not bring myself to use the organic slug pellets.