When we moved into our new house we had a sleeper raised front garden which is really lovely, I have always wanted a space like this and have enjoyed the last year of watching it from my kitchen window. It is very large and L shaped the first thing I did was to cut the L shape into 2 and make the nearest to the kitchen into a tenders such as lettuces, radishes etc and lots of herbs.
The second part nearest the street and opposite the kitchen window I wanted as my eye candy to view upon each day. However the whole garden just seemed to have massive overrun planting with no structure and so I have a large task ahead to sort out. I have pruned back sedge grass by 2/3 giving me a massive 30ft by 5ft patch and have been filling this space with all the tall and bushy plants like lupins and foxglove, but they have started flowering and had to stop. I have also been battling with them self seeding everywhere and have managed to get 50 seedling which I spent 2 months bringing on and now I have a little shop on my drive where I am selling them along side a few foxgloves.
There were far to many purple lupins in the boarder so I will be pulling some of these out to populate other parts of the garden as well as sell off to the local neighbours, and to break up the purples I purchased a pink and yellow west country lupin of which I will capture the seeds and pot on for the new year.
As I said above I am in process of moving the lupins and foxgloves to the rear of the boarder and them bring in a mid level flowering beauty followed by low level planting however I am battling Aubrietia which is suffocating the planned low level planting.
the lupins seem to flower really fast before seeding and I wish they would slow down so I could enjoy looking at them, it is great the foxgloves have popped up the same time as I just love their speckled throats and the whole patch is a buzz with bees.
Bring on year two and I really hope to have a handle on this space.
