We dig, dig, dig, dig, dig, dig....

A good garden day yesterday.
We've now dug out all but one of the stumps and roots from the bottom of the garden - only the weeds left to go (haha). It'll need levelling before we can get some grass seed down though.

There's a brick built old base for a greenhouse hidden in the left hand corner - we've been putting the soil in there from our stump-digging! One day (yeah right) it could become a veg patch but that's at the end of the "to-do" list. The garden slopes upwards, especially at the back which foreshortens it when you look out from the house so I want to level at least some of that bit then lay to grass while we think what to do next. There are really tatty conifersright at the back which screen us from the houses on the other side of the fenc, so they need to stay, but my plan (another one) is to plant a new shrubbery just in front to hide their tattiness. I wonder if I'll need to build a brick supporting wall though? That might look quite nice actually....

The momentous thing of the weekend was the planting of our little magnolia tree. We bought it a few years ago and as we didn't want to plant it somewhere we didn't plan to stay, we just kept in a serious of ever bigger pots. We both love magnolias and planting this one here seems to be symbolic - sorry if this sounds mushy and sentimental!

Here's the current view of the end of the garden, with the newly planted magnolia on the right




At the house end of the garden I'm quite chuffed to say that the bed nearest the house is almost sorted out. All the nasty invasive euphorbia which had launched a hostile takeover bid has been removed (although I guess it'll try to make a comeback as the roots go everywhere), I've thinned out the forget-me-nots and other stuff and even planted a few bits we brought with us from the other house, including one of my fave clematis, which seems to be doing really well there already. I'm going to plant one of our cordylines in this bit too - when I decide which one, I keep moving them around in their pots trying to decide where to put them.

Hubby spent a happy, muddy hour investigating the water feature in that bed too. He met some slugs, snails and a couple of little frogs who'd taken up residence. He had to take out all the stones and pebbles and wash the mud and gunge away, then clean out the pump thing but now we have a functioning fountain - it's one of those where the water looks a bit like a jellyfish - it's probably got a proper name, but that' ll have to do you for now.

I took this photo before the fountain was working so if the weather gets nicer later, I'll go out and turn the fountain on and do some more pics.