Happy New Garden
It’s a new year and our last visit to Lee and Noel was in early December 2002. Not very long ago,only a page on a different calendar, but when you hear how the garden has come on and the work accomplished, it could well be a full year rather than a new one.

The electricity supply to allow the garden to be lit has been installed professionally by a qualified electrician using armoured cable well buried with electrical warning tape laid over the wire. The control point is inside the house protected by a contact breaker. The other dwarf, dry stone wall has been completed using another 3-4 tons of wheelbarrowed stone. Excavated soil from the centre patio and path areas has been used to raise the beds to wall level. Green, lattice timber, fencing panels now screen the existing boundary fence making a usable backdrop
for the sitting area.

Lee wants to plant a summer jasmine, Jasminum officinale, to scramble through the wooden framework. With its highly perfumed, white flowers in summer and early autumn it will be a
winner for evening barbecues. All this work achieved over the Christmas holidays deserves a reward so they bought each other
plants.

Lee spent a fortune on a superb Yucca gloriosa. The “Spanish dagger” loves well drained soil in a sunny site. The tips of the sword-like evergreen leaves are deadly sharp. By next year it will produce tall spikes laden with bell shaped, pinkish-white flowers.

Noel bought one of my favourite plants, Choisya ternata, the Mexican orange blossom, with its aromatic, evergreen foliage and clusters of pure white scented flowers in early summer and again in autumn. He then went all romantic with a Leucothoe ‘Red Lips’ with good, deep red foliage and low growing.

Lee’s earlier enthusiasm for grasses seems to have waned. There is a rumour that she takes a big, thick, gardening book to bed every night and dreams of all sorts of plants. So much so that we are all going to a garden centre soon to decide on plants. You will be able to hear the reasoning behind the final choice and the efforts made to control Lee!

Far be it for me to complain, but when I mentioned roses I was told they were for old people! The producer didn’t help matters. She knew exactly what Lee meant and personally didn’t think roses were “FUNKY”!

I get the feeling Lee will make the decisions, Noel will write the cheque, Cherrie will give me a hand to carry the purchases and our producer will be looking for “hip and happy plants.