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Desperately in need of some advice
green.stuart
Posts: 16
in Plants
Hello,
I have a really ugly space in my garden and need a bit of help in how to transform it which will look nice and be relatively low maintenance. Ideally I would like to put in a flower bed but this is not something that I have attempted before. I have attached a couple of pictures which show the state of the soil and have heard that I might need half a tonne of sifted soil before attempting any planting. One of my concerns is that this space is on top of a raised wall and is also at an angle. Any help would be very gratefully received.
Thank you in advance
0
Posts
Is it sunny or shady? What's the change in height from the back to the front - it's hard to tell from the photo? Is there a wall behind? Or a fence?
“It's still magic even if you know how it's done.”
You could use bark chippings to cover the whole area with a weed membrane underneath, and then plant your plants inbetween. This should be very low maintenance. You would probably need to add a bag or 2 of bark to top it up every few years but its cheap.
You dont even have to use a weed membrane if you dont want, you may get slightly more weeds to pick out.
It is a shady area of the garden and the gradient is in the region of 30 degrees. There is a wire fence separating it from our neighbour's garden so I was thinking some shade loving climbing plants at the back might work?
It looks like you might need to do a bit of work to dig it over and remove old roots from the couple of stumps I can see. If you can get them out, so much the better. Then a good mulch of something like well rotted manure will help put some life back in the soil.
There's a climbing hydrangea that is happy in shade and will cope with the dry soil if you keep it watered for the first year, while it gets established. It possibly isn't very lime tolerant - I'm not sure - so it may depend what your soil is like. Japanese honeysuckle is evergreen and will put up with partial shade. Both of those are pretty tough and while they may be prettier with a bit of pruning, neither really needs it.
Apart from climbers, I find foxgloves - the native type (including the white variety) are quite tolerant of dry conditions and they like shade. They self seed and just go their own way so no maintenance required. 'Male' ferns - dryopteris - would also grow there, again, as long as you keep them watered for the first year. They need the old tatty leaves taken off in spring but not much else.
A regular (annual) mulch with bark chips would help keep the weeds down - depends what you mean by 'relatively low maintenance', really - as in 'never go back' or 'a couple of hours once or twice a year' or 'no more than an hour a month'. My suggestions are probably in the middle bracket
“It's still magic even if you know how it's done.”
You could go for a low effort approach - plant tough spreading plants like Vincas that will cover the ground and tolerate shade and poor soil. Rather than digging the whole lot over, you could just dig big holes to plant in and enrich the soil you backfill with. Autumn planting will allow the plants to get their roots established before the soil gets dry.
You can get a soil rotivator/tiller from amazon for £70-100. They are worth it if you have heavy compacted soil. Also good when needing to cultivate near a hedge as you often get big roots that are hard to get through with a spade.
Some native plants good for wildlife that prefer shade:
foxglove
wild strawberry (fragaria vesca)
dark mullein (verbascum nigrum)
primrose (primula vulgaris)
aquilegia (partial shade)
nettle leaved bellflower (Campanula trachelium)
dog violet (Viola riviniana)
Justsearch online for wildflower shade plugs
non-native: dicentra spectablis (partial shade)