Grass and a sad medlar

Normally Sunday is our best work day but I did not give much time to the garden today - glorious weather and the garden should be enjoyed too. I did find time to yank out our very sad medlar tree. This used to be on the top level but we moved it last Spring to make room for the kids' climbing frame. The weather for the move was perfect, though it was a little late. The tree thrived for two weeks and then we had five weeks of blistering March/April weather. I watered it every night but it was not enough. The tree produced leaves this Spring but it was half hearted and nothing much else happened. The fact I could pull a 10 year old tree straight out of the ground tells the story of how sad it was. We'll get a new one. Medlar jelly is delicious (though the cooking process produces the most hideous muck imaginable).

I also found time to top dress an area of the lawn that has been low for ages. I dug up the turf a month or so ago but did a rubbish job. The top dressing was dug out of the lawn borders (French drain?) when I replaced the "mower killing" stones with soft bark. The white fleece is to give some shade to that area. The lawn gets blasted by the Sun and a little shade makes a massive difference.

From Surprised Gar...

Background...

We bought the house from a church in April 1999, and we live in Uttlesford (NW Essex, UK). The garden had been ignored for probably 40 years (we found self sown trees and counted 40 rings). The garden slopes up from the house by about 4m over about 45m and is 15m wide. Uphill is West, the left hand side is South.

We both grew up a distrust of "gardening". Thomas liked mowing but nothing else. But the overgrown garden needed serious attention. We spent 6 months hacking away and spraying with Roundup, finding the contours of the garden and sketching up a basic plan. There was so much ivy and other rubbish that when we got in a digger to turn the garden in to our plan of three terraces we lost an awful lot of topsoil. As we have learned, we have found that this fact, the clay/flint soil we have make for continual challenges that we are generally too lazy to attack.

The garden:

From Surprised Gar...