Virginia Taylor - Author

Because the weather is so hot, I don't have any different photos to show of the cottage garden but I took a few early this morning of the main garden that gets a lot more water and shade than the cottage garden gets. That is changing. Very soon my garden will be connected to the bore system too and I will have far more time to do the gardening. Mainly this year I have been trying to keep the plants hydrated, which is a fancy way of saying 'watered.
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This week I didn't start or finish a new project. I had to clip back many overgrown plants because the weather is getting hotter and I find it hard to give my part of the garden as much water as it requires. Anyway, it's a lot tidier now and with luck I will have saved a few plants that were seriously singed. I took photos of colour combinations or pretty bits.

We should probably call this part of the garden The Mulberry Garden but we got used to saying 'the red garden' so that everyone knew the place we meant. It was never part of my plan but it shows from the street and I don't want people walking past to think that the rest of the garden is a mess. Therefore, I got into the habit of maintaining this part, unless I am too busy. I wish I had a 'before' photo. It was full of weeds. Long ago, someone thought a weed mat would be a good idea but without maintenance, it buried itself so deeply that it took a couple of weightlifters to tug out most of it. Some is still there but impossible to remove because of the plants growing on the top. The main feature used to be a rusty old plough sitting on the dry soil. One day we had a working-bee and cleaned up the worst of the weeds and planted red geraniums around the sides. Later on I bought more hebe but it died. We put in succulent cuttings and sebum and more red geraniums. The mulberry tree is there as a feature because one was purported to be in the original garden. The below is a photo I took today from the path below.

Photos from summer, autumn, winter, spring, for three years. The mulberry in the bottom left is looking better than I ever thought possible. It's starting to be the star of red garden bed.

The photos tell the story of the growth of the plants in the area between the two heritage almond trees. Below are the early days.

I took this photo today. The bird bath is new/old, requestioned from another part of the garden. For reasons known only to my soul, it makes me happy to have the birds drinking there.

Year by year the view changes with the growth of the plants.

The almond tree has been in the garden since the 1860s. I haven't seen an almond for the past two years because the blossom has been destroyed by the weather. In the top photo you can see a new little branch growing. It covers the area now. The other photos were taken during the past four years as the garden has been growing.

 From a pile of rocks and weeds, I made a strip garden that requires no water. Well, it gets some from the sky but no one ever has time to do more than that. I planted mainly succulents, but along the wall strip we put plumbago, the hardiest plant known to man or beast, or even delivery trucks. Below is the dry strip, rock filled and gravel topped. Out of this, with a little compost, a healthy garden was made, immediately above and below.

Three months ago a team of us weeded this horrible area and added house compost. Then hundreds of plants. The marquee pad is as lovely as the rest of the garden now, almost a show piece. Before and after.

The same area three months apart. Before and after.

The view from the house.

Like the rest of the garden, this area looked like a tangled mess when I first started. We had tacoma growing under the old almond tree (circa 1860) and plenty of small feral olives, nothing worth saving. A working bee cleared the area, which I then marked with a rock border. I had no plans for the garden here because I had too much else to do, but like the rest of the garden, the area began to fill with donated plants. The clivia came from another other part of the garden, the Chinese lantern plants were purchased, the hellebores were donated like the forget-me-not and the bulbs, namely bluebells and snowdrops. Today, this is what the area looks like. I may have to down size a little when I get a bit more time.

The next four photos are about a year apart, the last being the oldest photo, #1. Not only did I have no time to waste on building the Great Wall of Beaumont, I had very little idea of to pile up the rocks. I simply used the next I could reach. The year later, #2, I understood the balance and found a little more time to choose better sizes.

The starting point of this part of the garden was long before these photos were taken, of course. This area was covered in periwinkle with no visible path because it was not a garden but a wilderness full of weeds and old building materials. After I had the 'vandals' throw all the rocks I was about to use in a native garden area in the olive grove, I needed to put them somewhere. So I marked out these paths. People liked the area and began bringing plants but I didn't have much time to do more than dig them in. I knew the area would never be connected to water. The costs were too high. But people brought more and more plants that were not needed in their gardens, including heritage roses. The amazing thing about his garden can be seen in the following photos which were taken within the last month. Flowers, flowers, and flowers.

​The newly weeded, ready-to-grow area behind the fig tree.
The photos below show how the area looked after we had weeded. I had pulled down the rocks which had never been placed properly as a wall, which you can see in the photo on the left. In the photo on the right, I have done the rock wall and planted the pretty pink ground cover. Although it's tiny, I also have the native violet there. Both should totally cover the area some time soon. The very artistically placed cut branch from the old fig tree is meant as a decoration because of the lovely lichen on the wood. Eventually the native violets will decorate it too. The fig is delirious with joy after being pruned and the new growth is thick and strong. You can see an errant fig in the top photo. It's too early for the figs so it fell off soon after I took the photo. In this part of the fig tree garden, the plants are pinks and purples. In the part that you can't see here to the right of the fig in the top picture, the area is planted with cream and blue. With luck I will be able to take a photo of it next week and then we'll be done with the fig tree garden.