Our new garden project

When we moved into our new house nearly five months ago one of our priorities was to make the back garden look good.  Having a lovely garden is important to us. The garden in our previous house had been my pride and joy and we loved spending time there so we wanted to make this new garden into a space where we could sit and relax, and enjoy.  We still felt that we had enough energy in us to be able to create another garden, although we didn't want as big a garden as our last house had. Over the years we've created two gardens and two allotments so we're not afraid of hard work. Although we're much older now, so we didn't want to tackle anything too adventurous.

The new garden was a blank canvas, just a lawn. We thought it would be easy to dig out some borders and plant them up. A couple of seating areas for different times of the day would be nice, morning coffee in the sunshine on the paved area near the house and later in the day, sitting with a glass of wine over the other side of the garden in the late evening sunshine. I'd love a pergola with climbing plants,  a water feature and of course a shed.  

We thought about our budget which wasn't going to be very much. Being in our late sixties, early seventies we don't want a garden which is going to take years to develop, we want to enjoy it now. It's a bit like those garden makeover programmes on TV which provide instant gardens. The only instant colour and interest was from plants in pots which I had brought  from our old garden. I placed them around the garden where I thought they might eventually get planted and put some on the flagged area to add a bit of colour.

We soon found out that the garden has lots of problem areas. The  garden slopes down south west to the bottom and we noticed a number of  humps in the lawn, we wondered what those were. When we started work on digging out borders we found heavy clay soil. When it rains (and it has done a lot of raining this summer) the garden does not drain well. There were puddles down at the bottom of the garden and the lawn was very squelchy.

We've dealt with clay soil before in our first garden, so we had an idea of what to do. Digging a land drain and trying to break down the soil by incorporating plenty of bulky organic material was important and maybe building raised beds.  I have been making lists of plants which will grow in wet, heavy soils. There are lots of plans going around in my head and I need to put them down on paper.
This garden project is not going to be as easy as we first thought.