'My filthy workshop of creation...'

I’ve been making something, and the garden is messy

That’s a phrase from Mary Shelley’s moving and terrifying 1818 novel, Frankenstein. If you haven’t read it, let me tell you, it’s not what you think. Get a copy. Read. It’s short. Takes a bit of getting into but completely worth the effort.

Ms. Shelley gives those words to Doctor Frankenstein, the creator of the famous Monster. The Monster, like the rest of us, wants love and craves acceptance, and longs for education, which he gets by listening to someone reading Paradise Lost aloud night after night through a window…

The ‘filthy workshop’ phrase has always seemed relevant to me, as I look around at the mess I create while creating. Or even just living.

When I had an office I managed to keep it tidy because visitors came there and I wanted to set an example to others like myself who were messy. But I’ve been struggling all my adult life to do that at home. In both house and garden.

Back Garden hard landscaping has been the obsession this week and I’ve been working alongside Groundworks Man (He Who Can Totally Fill A Big Skip With Concrete Rubble in A Day) to move concrete and earth and the find the lost manhole cover. It’s all made quite a mess.

Hard landscaping is something garden makers are advised to do at the start but I never could because the cost was too great. Gardening can be an expensive pastime at best, and doing groundworks or hard landscaping, if you can’t do it yourself, is very expensive, to say nothing of the deep levels of disruption involved if your garden is in any sense ‘established’. Nevertheless, that unhappy position is where I find myself, twenty years into this garden.

Finding the drain cover

The plan is to replace all the unpleasant white concrete paving slabs (see row 2, central picture) with a limited number of brick pavers (expensive) and much golden gravel (cheaper). No other hard-landscaping materials will be present in Back Garden.

A dear associate of mine keeps suggesting that the white slabs could be painted (adding with masonry paint, as if that would convince me) in order to save all this expense and hassle. Dear Associate puts it to Groundworks Man - who, I have to admit, is not enjoying digging up the four inch of concrete base under the white slabs - What do you think about painting them?

Well, you could do that, Groundworks Man replies. Three coats. And then a sealing coat. A lean-on-the-shovel pause. It will wear, he confesses, where there is foot traffic.

It will wear, where there is foot traffic. Which is everywhere we walk.

No. There can be no painting of slabs.

Alongside all this, another problem emerged a few weeks ago, when we thought the drains were blocked and had to call out a plumber. The problem is, we no longer know where to find the drain inspection cover, because I have gardened over it. Yes, overed the last thirty years, I’ve covered it in soil and plants. I thought I would be able to remember where it was, but no. Imagine ‘Pin The Tail On The Donkey’ with tons of soil and a blocked drain.

Plumber fixed the apparent blockage problem (it was an airlock) but left saying, in no uncertain terms, Find That Drain Cover.

So the slabs are coming up, the four inch base layer is coming up, and Groundworks Man is not only smashing all those slabs and sub-base concrete but also barrowing the debris around the outside of the house and round the corner of the street to the skip, which, for logistical reasons, has to be in front garden.

A diagram of the logistical problem. Double Yellow lines on the road at the bottom of our highly secret back alley. Purple marks the route to the skip. I’ve missed the house out. Some would say that’s typical.

As Groundworks Man toils at the truly hard labour, I am removing, what were, before I had the allotment, four one metre square herb/vegetable beds. And I am looking for the Drain Inspection Cover, which was about there, I say, hammering a road pin into the loose soil, but the road pin goes down and down, as many times as I try it, without hitting the Drain Inspection Cover.

And as Groundworks Man labours, I, like some sort of modern day Marie Antoinette playing shepherdess in a fancy silk frock, am also trying to think how to set out the areas of the cost-limited pavers and the more affordable gravel while telling myself thinking is also work. The white marks on the ground in the pictures above are lines of possible paver, or areas of possible gravel. And yet, day after day, I feel I can’t see the new layout until the old layout is gone.

We’re going to need another skip.

When I turn away from the mess some Very Good Things are happening in the garden.

Top Left : Yellow tulips and Kerria Japonica, with Euphorbia Wulfenii and Phyllostachys Vivax Aureocaulis (Giant Golden Bamboo) all together in the large raised bed in which I grow the bamboo.

Top right: Myrrhis odorata - this delightful cottage-garden style perennial is an early joy, with finely cut fern-like leaves and cow-parsley type umbels of white. Very pretty with the apple blossom, or under roses. it seeds around and yet is easy to keep under control. I’m digging some up to take to Calderstones.

Bottom Left: Euphorbia Polychroma possibly my favourite of the spring flowers, because so limey, and such a great shape, a roundy hummock, cushion-soft, of floriferous joy.

Bottom right: A warm corner under the Myrtle where a tiny Japanese Acer (name?) in a pot, now basking in a little spring sunlight, looks very happy to have survived the winter.

Shakespeare, taller now on his rebuilt plinth, looking over some of the new gravel. He calls them ‘stones’. If only the garden did have a running brook!

And this our life, exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything.

Shakespeare, As You Like It

And finally, plant of the week: Erodium

I don’t know the variety, but it’s probably ‘trifolium’. This delight is about 25cms high, and the same wide. I bought it at a plant sale at an NGS Open Day somewhere down towards Market Drayton… I planted in a container, and it has been thoroughly neglected. Yet it’s been looking good for weeks, and is now utterly spectacular. Check Erodiums out here. Cuttings, please, Jane.