Lou's Writing News, Cues and Reviews: October's Mid-Month Musings: Sticking It In The Ground The Right Way Up

Well-known gardener, Monty Don, once said: "Gardening is easy. Stick it in the ground the right way up and most plants will grow perfectly well.”

I suspect my own gardening 'prowess' might prove him wrong. For instance, I've lost the ID labels for most of the plants in my garden, so I don't even know their names, which makes learning more about them a tad tricky. I've downloaded several plant identification apps over the years, but they've generally been useless - I've photographed plants I can easily recognise, such as marigolds, as a test, and been told by the apps that they're police cars or cream teas...

Marigolds in my garden - the plant at the front is an Achillea [Yarrow] which was stunning when it was blooming with bright orangey-red and yellow flowers. It's now just got feather-like frondy leaves, which look like smaller versions of the marigold leaves. I put them next to each other because of this, but true gardeners would probably use some more scientific method of deciding where to position their plants.

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I take a hit-and-miss approach to growing things, planting everything in multi-purpose compost and waiting for something to happen. For the past few years, I've taken seeds from plants in the garden, stored them in jars over winter, then planted them out in the Spring [often not bothering with the seedling-on-the-windowsill step], and sometimes I've been pleasantly surprised by the flowers that emerge, sometimes not - but I've never felt the success or failure of such plants has anything to do with me personally. I'm a lazy person; I do as little as possible. I've probably mentioned this before, but P sometimes calls me 'Staples' in our house after a character in the sitcom Frasier who was so lazy he stapled his trouser hems when he needed to shorten them. In gardening terms, I'm a champion dandelion-grower.

This laziness is why my garden renovation, which began at the beginning of last year, is still not finished. I've promised you several times that I'd show you the finished product, but I'm afraid it's still only half-done. My elderly mum visited last Sunday, looked sceptically at the garden, and said: "I really think it would look better if you moved all the buckets and bags of gravel". She seemed to genuinely think these things were there as part of the garden design - probably because she'd seen them so often. Mind you, she also thought that the white gravel chippings we've used in the centre of the garden were actually polystyrene packing peanuts. Her words were: "You do realise they'll blow away in the winter, don't you?"

Anyway, I thought I'd update you on my progress, such as it is. It'll probably be another two years before it's actually completed...

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A mix of various flowers including aubretia that we planted

in a large oval raised bed in centre of garden [October 2025]

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We live in the middle of a short terrace of three houses. The garden, at the back, is very small and squashed between our two next-door neighbours’ slightly bigger ones. The gate at the back leads out onto a dark, narrow ginnel between the side of the block of garages and the back fences of the terraces’ three gardens. It’s a perfect place for stripy garden spiders to spin their webs at face height on Autumn mornings, or for black ice to make walking down it in winter feel like being in one of those 'funhouses' you used to get in old-fashioned fairgrounds. It would be a perfect location for a mugging.

Despite these factors, neither we nor our neighbours on either side have ever tried putting any lights up there. We just stumble nervously down it in winter, guiding ourselves by trailing a hand down the garage wall, or using the torches on our phones if we remember they exist. It’s as if lighting will somehow spoil the ambience. Everyone needs a bit of excitement in their lives, and ours is gambling on whether or not a homicidal maniac has decided to lurk in the shadows of this passageway ready to murder us. Or whether we'll unintentionally tread on the tail of a local cat hiding in a corner, resulting in serious trauma for everyone.

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Overview of part of garden including water butt.

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The ginnel also gets untidy, what with rubbish blown in from skips during the never-ending house renovation taking place on our street, and bits of gunk thrown down by the birds from the guttering round the garage roof. I’ve been thinking of giving it a good sweep and pulling up the weeds for a while now, ever since we and the neighbours on the left had new fencing put up. The new fence and gates show up the ginnel’s defects by contrast. I finally did this a few weeks ago and even put a plant beside the gate in the passageway itself, which looks nice. However, I didn't get round to taking a photo. See what I mean - lazy...

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Another part of the unfinished 'rockery', showing a black pot full of flowering spearmint and small terracotta pot containing flowers whose labels were lost so we have no idea what they are.

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Some DIY garden renovators would have planned their project in advance, researched the best way to do it, bought the appropriate tools and done it in the most suitable time of year. But, being me, I ended up ‘doing the garden’ in random bits, 'designing it' as I went along, so it was left over the winter in a state of half-finishedness. It looked like a dried up swamp in the spring. Then I spread out a cheap semi-permeable membrane I bought off Amazon, and poured on the gravel in a cackhanded manner. I gave no thought to putting down sand, using a spirit level or building proper dividers between different sections. I just threw down the gravel and jumped on it.

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A pic taken in August, showing our water-butt [when it rains, the builders' buckets all over the patio get full of water but barely any gets into the water butt, so we end up pouring it in manually!]. Beside butt is a plant that had bright yellow flowers on it when we first bought it [the plant in the ornate square pot] - beside that is a pot of marigolds I grew from seed, then something I can't identify and a pot of scabious which at the point in time, when I took this photo, had no flowers on it though it was covered in pale purple blooms a week before this photo was taken and was covered in blooms again in late September. Who knows why? Well, not me, obviously! The big terracotta pot contains the twisted hazel tree a friend bought me for my sixtieth - the leaves are almost all off the tree now, but they are still there in this photo. We've had no hazelnuts yet, but the catkins are a bit bigger this year than last. The two small pots at the bottom of the picture are unidentified - possibly pinks or dahlias. Who knows?

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Catkins beginning to grow on the twisted hazel,

about a month later than previous picture

View of garden showing how shady it gets in the early afternoon onwards. You can also see two of the blue ceramic balls we bought in B & Q's sale [one is lurking behind the undergrowth]. These were a great bargain - I bought four altogether and they were reduced by at least two thirds. We got one of them for free as it had a crack in it and was a slightly paler blue than the others. I now know how exciting it feels to get a bargain!

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However, it's now Autumn and I'm engaged in a running battle with the leaves from the nearby hawthorn and horse chestnut trees. We have rarely cleared-up fallen leaves in the past - dead leaves look nice, provide housing and possibly food for wildlife, and vanish over the winter [either mulching down into the soil or being blown away into someone else's garden], so why bother? But now we've got rid of the lawn and the garden is covered in gravel, the leaves look messy rather than picturesque, and the passage behind the garden looks untidy again. It currently looks particularly bad due to housing an old, folded-up wooden garden table and a rusty metal doormat we had outside the patio doors, both awaiting collection by the council. And my niece is bringing round a trellis for us this evening which she is going to leave in the passage too.

Also, following instructions by Alan Titchmarsh no less, we are putting raked up leaves in black bin liners, fastening them up and poking a few holes in them, and saving them for next spring when apparently they will have turned into good quality compost. However, where are you supposed to keep all the black bags full of leaves? Do they need to be undercover to avoid the rain? Can they be flung in the garage with all the other pointless junk?

P's friend and his assistant, whom I think of as Laurel and Hardy, came round to do some external paintwork and fit a new bin-shed door a few weeks ago. They left the old bin-shed door on our front lawn, among the huge weeds, as they planned to take all the rubbish away together. That was six weeks and several texts ago, as the assistant [Laurel] is now in hospital having his gall-bladder removed. So the outside of the house at both sides currently looks like Chav Central. All we need now is a rusting Ford Fiesta with no wheels standing on bricks on the front lawn to complete that 1970s underclass chic that always gives homes such vintage charm.

After dumping the old bin-shed door at the front of the house, Laurel and Hardy then went round the back, climbed up their ladders and managed to drop some kind of tool onto the top of our new little shed's roof, creating a hole, and then one of them dropped their paint-pot while up the ladder - it landed on the patio and one of them walked through the spilled white paint on their way out, leaving white footprints all the way down the path and down the ginnel. They deny this, despite the evidence. Remember that Simpsons' episode where Bart's teacher accuses him of smashing the fish tank and he denies it vehemently despite clearly holding one end of the string that is attached to the object that broke the glass which is now dangling in the smashed tank? We could have got a better job done if we'd employed more competent workmen, but the Chuckle Brothers weren't available.

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At last a plant I can recognise.: a fuchsia.

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One side of garden, earlier in the year, showing part of unfinished 'rockery' and tallest raised bed [on the right] which is full of small blue and white flowers that have overtaken most of the other flowers I planted there back in the spring. There are a few red dahlias here and there, but the only thing that is fighting back against the aubretia/lobelia-type flowers is a salvia called 'hot lips' which is now much taller than the rest but you can't see it on this photo. On the left, you can see [at the bottom] a fuchsia, an unidentified plant, the cotoneaster in the circular raised bed, a pot of geraniums and other unidentified flowers, a big pot with frondy ferny leaves which had pointed spikes of fluffy white flowers in the summer which resembled feather dusters.

My lovely little blue shed with spearmint in front of it - the spearmint was there temporarily. The spearmint, which we have had for years, is now [in October] covered in healthy-looking purple flowers, which seems odd to me as I thought everything would die off as the weather got colder.

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The garden itself has a semi-circular patio made of rustic flagstones which haven’t been cleaned in twenty years. I can't remember what their original colour was. I'm intending to borrow my mum's Karcher at some point to try cleaning them. Beyond the patio was a square of lawn with a narrow flagstoned path running from the gate to the patio, but the lawn is now gone. The path is set too far to the right and is too narrow.

A few years ago, our neighbours on the left cut down an old ivy-covered tree in their garden and the ivy spores floated over into our garden and set up home in the fence on the right – the fence panels are now heavy with ivy which needs to come down as, though it looks nice, it is taking over half the path from the gate and ruining the old fencing which still runs down that side between our garden and our neighbours’ on the right. When you come down the overly narrow path, which is set too close to the fence, you feel like the ivy is going to grab you and drag into its bushy universe.

Ivy seems to be more or less indestructible - it's the Terminator of British garden plants. But it is a great habitat for wildlife, so I'm leaving it till next year to decide what to do with it - either get a professional to remove it, or keep it and just keep cutting it back [our neighbours on the right really hate it as it grows quite high above the fence... Look, I'm short and have short arms, and I get dizzy up ladders, so I can't be expected to cut it back more than I already have done...).

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Ivy growing on fence down side of path - you can seehow narrow the path is, Next year I will pay someone to turn slabs round and/or remove ivy.

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This is one end of the highest raised bed. It was very different when we first planted it, but some things died and we added a couple of other things such as the tall salvia with white petals with cerise edges (the plant is called 'hot lips', I believe).

This is what the raised bed looked like

just after it was first planted, back in May.

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When P and I first moved in, twenty-five years ago, my sister and I dug out an area at the back of the lawn and filled it with slate chippings, onto which I placed several flowers in pots. Some summers, this area has been filled with colourful pots, but at others it has been left to fester. We’ve had different things on this patch over the years – a wooden bench, a metal bench, a wooden table, granite memorials to our two beloved cats… At one time, I had several realistic-looking plastic pigs my mum bought us, trotting across the slate. At another, we had a terracotta cat with holes in its sides, so the light from a candle placed inside its hollow body sent out rays of flickering light on Halloween, but this always made me think the poor beast had been shot by a machine-gun in some sort of cat version of the Valentine's Day Massacre.

And to say we weren't all that interested in the lawn would be an understatement. It was more dandelion and moss than turf. We both hated mowing it. When we dug it up, the soil beneath was in fabulous condition, aerated by so many dandelion roots that the starving miners in Germinal could have survived several weeks longer had they had access to it.

I have felt bad about destroying the habitat of the multitude of insects and worms that must have lived there. I doubt that three raised flower-beds, a couple of insect houses, three bird-feeders and a bird bath make up for the damage we've done to the natural wildlife that lived in our garden before we laid the gravel. But at least we no longer have to mow the lawn - so that's ok.

The bloody dandelions are still growing up through the gravel, however, even though we ensured we put down double sheets of semi-permeable membrane, and ensured it all overlapped at the edges. We have been using stuff like vinegar and hot water to kill them off, but these things don't work very well so we'll probably have to resort to chemical warfare next year, or just consider the weeds to be an intended feature of the garden.

We both hate gardening, though we like gardens. I used to justify our laziness by telling myself I was allowing the garden to run wild to preserve it for the insects and birds, but I knew deep-down that it was just plain laziness. Let’s face it, most years it looks like it belongs to a pair of bone-idle, gormless hillbillies.

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One of the two small round raised beds with various flowers in it - the yellow flowers [some sort of bulb?] replaced some previous flowers that died within a week of being planted.😞

One of the fence pots containing fuchsias and something else...

[front] Various flowers in a pot on edge of 'rockery' - big frondy ferny plant in grey pot behind it [I love this plant as I love ferns - it might not be a fern but I love it anyway. I think bracken is beautiful and had a large terracotta pot full of it for years until I learned it was poisonous. The bracken blew into the pot, grew, stayed beautiful and green all summer, died off in Autumn and winter, then returned in spring, and it never spread beyond the pot - in many ways my perfect plant. Anyway, we did finally get rid of it and bought this plant instead. It had white flowers in the summer, tiny ones arranged in a cone shape, but these turned brown and now the leaves are turning orangey-brown. If anyone knows what it is, let me know].

A dazzling plant which I think is a dahlia ['Bizon Red'] - this is still flowering now in late October and is a stunning colour. It love it.

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Herb potting table - bottom: curry plant, oregano, ginger mint; top -

mint, rosemary and thyme [little shelf slightly higher], common sage, chives

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Below are the terracotta pots I painted for the herbs. They have weathered over the last two months since being put outside, but they have a vintage charm. The best one is the rosemary one - I went wrong during the painting and had to paint over the original, so I ended up painting butterflies all over it - so I've shown you each side [below].

There is also an oregano and a garden mint.

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I should have aimed at a modernist design, pared down, easy to maintain and with carefully-researched plants. That would have been sensible - but it wouldn't have been me!

Instead, I’ve gone for the maximalist look - three raised beds, a twisted hazel tree in a large ceramic pot, a bird bath, a bird house, an insect house, three blue ceramic spheres, a tiny shed, an outdoor potting table, decorations for the fence, hanging bird feeders, those plant pots that hang over the fence, a rockery, and decorations formed by placing pebbles onto gravel. And painted pebbles, which haven't been put out this summer but will be next year... All it needs now is some rhinestone swags and a pair of feathered sunglasses and it’ll be going full Elton...

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