Over the past month or so I’ve been fitting in a few hours here and there on finishing the hard landscaping. This is long overdue. The rest of the garden – the really important parts; the borders, shrubs, trees, etc. – has been done for some years (although, like all gardens, it’s in a state of constant development). While the shapes of the patios and paths were laid out with the rest of the design, the work of filling in and laying a finish has been intermittent. It’s back-breaking work, and fiddly when you’re re-using materials reclaimed from elsewhere as much as possible.

This is the path that runs up the garden from the house, past the garage, with straight lines and a couple of 90 degree turns…

The old reconstituted slabs (which I’m re-using) were, until this week, just laid on top of grass on this stretch beside the garage. I’ve now dug out the soil, banged in some of the bigger lumps of concrete, blocks etc. for the edges, and filled in with smaller pieces of rubble, and gravel. The next stage (once I’ve gone to pick up some more bags of sand and cement) is to cement in a row of the diamond-patterned engineering bricks along either side. Then I’ll top up the middle with scalpings (re-claimed from hard landscaping I removed elsewhere in the garden) and cement in the slabs. To show what it will look like, here’s the section of path I’ve done already…

I’m pushing on now. I’d really like to be able to move around the garden without that constant element of danger that ‘pavement surfing’ brings. There are three areas of paving to be finished. The main patio is behind our garden room…

The digging out and filling in is done. Next, I’ll need to order some new paving (there isn’t enough of the re-claimed stuff) and set about laying it. Queue more back-breaking work lifting heavy paving stones and knocking up concrete mixes! This area catches the morning sun, and I’m really looking forward to being able to sit out here and have breakfast, and mid-morning coffee. Despite the importance I put on the planting, I would concede there is also great value in having nice patios to sit on! We’re thinking of a natural slate for this patio, enhanced by the addition of lots of plants in pots.

There’s another sitting area under a pergola, beneath the large birch tree, at the end of the garden…

This get’s the sun until early evening in summer, so it’s where we would eat out on summer evenings. Ideally, we’d like to have a pizza oven, but whether that will ever happen or not is anyone’s guess. This patio is a bit of a mish-mash. I gave up lifting the existing paving, which was all over the place, because it’s concreted in like you wouldn’t believe. I’m leaving the rest where it is, but I’ve made good, and then used those stones I managed to salvage (along with some of the engineering bricks) to make an edge for the new shape patio. The rest is being filled in with slate chippings reclaimed from elsewhere (we need to wash the rest before we can use them to fill in the gaps, hence it not being finished yet).

The final paved area, outside the back door, consisted of the diamond bricks laid directly onto sand…

We haven’t quite decided what to do with this, but it will probably be a mix of new slate slabs and any of the bricks we have left over. This will be the last of the hard landscaping jobs, e.t.a. this September (but don’t hold me to that!)

We’re still overrun with sparrows. The primroses in our tiny ‘woodland’ patch were progressing well, but we didn’t seem to be getting any flowers. Something was eating them. I thought it might be voles. Or possibly wood pigeons – we get a lot of those too…

But then I caught the sparrows at it. Here’s the result…

There are a few primroses elsewhere in the garden that have so far survived intact…

It’s hard not to love the birds, but they can be infuriatingly mischievous! The sparrows seem to congregate around us, I think because we are an oasis of planting in a largely treeless wasteland of intensive agriculture and butchered hedgerows (thanks to those ‘custodians of the countryside’ – the farmers). They also like to nest in our eaves (the sparrows, not the farmers!)

After a prolonged period of cold and dull weather the spring flowers that have been peeping up above ground finally managed to open up. These are Crocus tommasinianus that are being rather slow to naturalise in the grass…

Yellow crocuses, already in the garden when we arrived, but moved to beneath one of the pear trees, are coming out now too…

We planted quite a few of the little blue anemones. They disappear completely once they’ve flowered, so it’s easy to inadvertently disturb them later in the year, which could explain why they are few and far between. One of them has put out an early flower though…

Unlike some of the other spring flowers, snowdrops seem to like our ‘terroir’ and are spreading nicely…

After a brief, bright interlude, we’re back to foul weather. It’s much less cold, but wet and very windy. Still, the emergence of spring flowers is a sign of things to come. Buds on shrubs and trees are beginning to swell, and the days are getting longer. It shouldn’t be too long before the garden really gets going…