Getting 'Em In.

The last of the leaves are being cleared everywhere..............

 Any remaining bedding plants are being taken out............

 And during December, only one grass cut everywhere if needed.

 The Box hedging is now in place............

 Lavenders are given their new home..............

 Very chique, grey granite planters are starting to be sourced, planted and placed at the new house in Sandbanks...........

 And yes, one missing, but being imported, so hopefully it will be here soon.

 Meanwhile, around the side of the house, in the back, these two 'grass' areas are being targeted next. The small one on the right is having 30mm blue scottish pebbles in place of the grass, and a 6ft chrome sculpture as a feature. The summer house is to be surrounded by the same pebbles. Meanwhile, the larger grass area on the left is so far going to have the horrible old conifers that you can just see, removed. The grass will then be taken up, about ten formally shaped shrubs planted in front of the laurel hedge, and walnut stained wood chips underneath. Although, having said that, it may have to wait another week, as I am sat on the sofa at the moment, it's 8.30am, and looking out on gale force winds and torrential rain, so no work today. More tea I think!

 So, my mug is refilled with hot, sweet tea, and now on to the next thing that we did last week.
I mentioned in an earlier post about the Laurel and Arbutus hedge that dominated this border, and the fact that it needed to be removed and a completely new planting scheme put in place. The plan was made and costed, it was then presented to the owners of the property, and due to the high cost of the work it was agreed to do it in two stages, the first being now, and the remainder next spring. The border is quite large and as such we made a scale plan, gridded it out in 5ft squares, and spread evergreen, deciduous and herbaceous plants evenly throughout. The difficulty with being asked to only plant half for now is getting some sort of coverage throughout, and so we mainly went for the evergreens, with a small selection of herbaceous plants, so that some colour would be evident until the final stage.

There was a large Phormium tenax and Photinia 'Red Robin' still in the border, and these were cleaned up and transplanted to the rear corner.

The first of the new plants, a clump of Euphorbia wulfenii, get laid out and planted.

The first tea and biscuits are very kindly brought out to us, and we take a break while looking at the plan one more time. The green shaded areas are where the evergreen plants are to go, the white ones where the deciduous and herbaceous.

It was a cold and windy day, but the planting went well.

And all it needed before we left at the end of the day was some watering to bed things in nicely.

The following morning we received a lovely email from the residents, thanking us for the work so far, and commenting on how they are looking forward to seeing all of the plants in next year, based on what they can see so far. All too often, work is planned and executed, without ever hearing from anybody regarding satisfaction, and so it's really nice to get some feedback.

Thanks for dropping in.