Someone mentioned recently that I haven’t shared photos of my garden recently…that’s because it’s been looking a bit like a builders yard!

Last summer I did some serious thinking about our house and our future here. We’ve got to the age when you need to start planning, do you stay put and make the house work, or move whilst you’re still young enough to cope with it.

We live in a dormer bungalow so in many ways it’s perfect for growing old in, our bedroom is downstairs, we have a downstairs bathroom. We could live downstairs if we needed to. On the negative side, it has a steep drive and a large garden.

The garden is terraced so it does have some drops which are concerning me more as my balance and MS are getting slightly worse. In particular the area in front of the Amber and Amethyst garden has a 5′ drop onto concrete if I wobble the wrong way! I decided it’s also this left hand side of the garden which is the highest maintenance so a radical rethink was required.

I looked at the plants I wanted to keep and worked out a design round that. My priority was the Roald Dahl standard rose which I bought when my mum died. Near to it were a few nice shrubs which were on my ‘like to keep’ list, that includes a sarcocca, an acer, a eunonymous elatas and another shrub which I don’t know the name of!

I started off with circles but I couldn’t get the long border to look right, then my daughter suggested squares and rectangles…in the end I’ve gone in between using arcs to make one large seating area and one small one where I will put a ‘banana bench’. We’ve got some sturdy trellis in front of the big drop, some lovely new steps up to the back lane and I also had the path round the pond made a little wider to again make the bed easier to manage.

The landscaper finished at the weekend, I’ve hopefully got a load of topsoil and compost arriving on Wednesday and once that has topped the beds up I can start replanting everything I saved, time will tell what has survived and what hasn’t.

As you can see, I managed to keep the shrubs that I didn’t want to move. The sarcoccus (sweet box) smells amazing at the moment.

The hellebores are in flower too and two of them in particular are looking gorgeous. The purple one is up by the saved shrubs, the freckled one is down by the patio. I’ve bought a couple more too on the market last week so I’ll get those planted soon.

So, big changes in the garden, hopefully soon it will look like a garden again, full of flowers and scent.