Another garden-post!
I forgot to take photos of two of the Garden Features : the anchors. These were discovered on the estuary floor by the previous owner of the house, who was a diving instructor. I've taken those rather ugly plastic pots away and filled them with pelargoniums now.
the smaller anchor
This big one, much to Pp's delight, is the anchor of the (a) Good Ship Venus.
There seem to be hundreds of ships called Venus, and one of them sank off Milford Haven, and this is a completely unsuggestive bit of it.
Here's the view along the back wall from the Small Anchor. I didn't know what to do with those enclosed beds on the left. Some of them have now voluntarily filled themselves with potatoes (as in, I didn't plant them, they just came up), and I sprinkled wild flower seed on the rest. The cornflowers and poppies seem to be coming up nicely, though they aren't flowering yet. The cotoneaster in the foreground is buzzing with bees.
The area where I plonked a sedum carpet on to the bare concrete is absolutely thriving. I was a bit worried that the dogs would cause problems if they peed on it, but it seems to be able to cope with that just as a grass lawn would. So I've added more :
The new bit is the reddish bit. If it's like the rest of it, it will green up pretty fast. It's also coming into bloom, little yellow flowers so far mostly. I need to get some more bark to finish the path on the right, and you can just about see the fence to hold the hounds in that is strung between those giant recycled plastic planters next to it. The raised herb bed on the left was already there, and is a bee magnet with loads of thyme and rosemary.
Still working on adding the recycled plastic fence posts along the narrow strip of lawn on the right to keep the fence up, and also on planting the rose bushes that I hope will grow through the fence and down those concrete steps (which are not used as steps, and both I and the neighbours on that side are baffled as to *why* they have been made steps and not just left as open bank. I'm having to hack through the red gravel to make a space for my roses, I hope they will survive the stones if I offer them enough welll-rotted manure to compensate.
And here are three pics of my attempt to get a thyme lawn growing , as a change from the sedum. The blanket thing is sheepswool, which is now almost valueless as a fibre and sold for gardens instead. The chocolaty stuff is coir compost, made from coconut husks, which has the great advantage of coming in sort of giant cubes that you put water on and they puff up.
I also put cardboard, straw, paper, cotton under the sheepswool, to create a mulch as they rot down, and also because the cardboard bin fills up so fast!
I then shoved some pots on top - the plastic ones from that first pic with the anchor, actually. They look better with plants in and toppd with a couple of big red stones to keep the moisture in and the pot from blowing away. And I planted thymes along the inner edge. In theory they should spread out to cover the whole thing and create a no-mow low maintenance lawn mat. In theory.
The positioning of the pots and the bricks is to try to keep it all in place, because I found that even if the sheepswool was sodden, it's light enough that a real storm can lift it up and move it about. These bricks look like more of the previous owner's diving finds, since many of them have shells stuck to them and they are all round at the corners. I suspect that removing Heritage Bricks from the sea-bed is now frowned-on, but since I don't know where they came from, I don't feel I can be blamed for not putting them back.