Making a lonely dark corner into something lovely

Being an Artisan gardener means.... that you could do something simple and ordinary, but instead you choose to go one step beyond....

Here's the situation:  a very elderly Prunus cerasifera - and look at that fantastic twisted trunk! - living all alone, in a dark gloomy corner containing my leaf mold pens.

There is also a water butt, for watering the leaf mold, but not much else. There's a load of beastly ivy, clawing across the ground towards the tree, an old wooden seat, some ancient rotted lengths of tree trunk, some old bricks and garden rubble, and not much else.

"Can you do something with this corner?" sighed my Client. "It's so ugly."

I agreed, but then, does anyone apart from the two of us actually ever go there?

"Oh yes," said my Client, much to my surprise, "I am always showing visitors your leaf mold pens."

Gulp.

There was me thinking that I was the only one who cared.

So, what can I do?

Obviously I could take the easy option, and just tidy it up a bit: there's a stack of black and green bin liners with leaves in, waiting for there to be room in the current leaf mold pile, so I could stack them more neatly, out of sight.

And I could possibly make a neater pile of the bricks, and maybe I could scrape up that huge pile of garden rubble, dug out over many years, and move it out of sight somewhere.


Or.... I could do something a bit more interesting.

So this is what I did.

Neat brick edging to make a circle around the tree, and a pathway to the leaf mold pens.

There were two colours of garden rubble:  red brick and white "stone", so I used them for the infill, but arranged the colours in a basic sort of pattern.

There wasn't time to do anything spectacular or stylish, but I thought a simple pattern would be better than nothing.

I moved the log seat along a bit, so now you can sit on it an admire the garden: and now visitors can admire my leaf mold pens without getting muddy feet.

And, it used up quite a lot of the pile of garden rubble, along with most of the old bricks.

Nice! 

 

Did you enjoy this article? Did you find it useful? Would you like me to answer your own, personal, gardening question? Become a Patron - just click here - and support me! Or use the Donate button for a one-off donation. If just 10% of my visitors gave me a pound a month, I'd be able to spend a lot more time answering all the questions!!