Garden Journal - Tidying Up An Overgrown Flowerbed

Okay, it's time to brave the job I've been putting off for far, far too long. Clearing out the bramble patch that should be the front flowerbed.

For as long as we've had the house, this has been a problem area of the garden. It's had a variety of trees over the years, many of which have been lost to honey fungus.

Currently, it's got;

• A holly sapling - a shoot from a row of three that were unhealthy and had to be cut down
• A self-seeded yew tree. It'll be spectacular in about a century, and is one of the few trees that really resists honey fungus.
• A pear tree we planted.
• A self-seeded wild pear, which is healthy but really crowding out the one that actually makes fruit.
• A walnut tree given to us by a careless squirrel. It's about 5 years old and already making a few walnuts, although our tree surgeon told us that walnut trees don't usually make nuts until they are around 15 years old !
• A couple of dogwoods, one wild which makes beautiful purple berries in winter to give the garden some colour then.

But the rest of the bed is a mess of brambles, hidden ground-crawling ivy, general weeds, evil bindweed and Spanish bluebells (which are pretty, but help the bindweed and ivy hide).

Above is the "before" picture. I've already cut back the dogwood on the right hand side very hard.

Below are a couple of shots of the front end of the bed. Lots of spiky brambles !

After many hours of work, spread over three days, I'd cleared out most of the undergrowth, pulled up the bluebells, and dug out a bonkers amount of bindweed roots. It's always hard taking photos of small trees and shrubs, but in the centre of the picture you can see several upright stems which are the self-seeded pear tree, and behind at an angle is that actual good pear tree.

With most of the weeds gone, I dug a small trench at the edge of the bed. The plan is to bark chip the whole thing, and the trench will hopefully reduce the amount that spills onto the driveway.

This is the wild pear cut down - there was a lot more of it than I originally thought ! Now the proper pear tree has room to breathe, and hopefully the fruit will grow better. The pile of small logs are the stems of the wild pear, which I cut up for our neighbour's daughter. She's got pet rats, and they love nibbling on fruit wood 😀

The bark chips ! Turns out I didn't buy nearly enough....

Although bark chips don't have the visual appeal of flowers, they're lower maintenance and help to control the weeds. They also have an added benefit; I've added bark chips to this flowerbed several times over the years, and as they mulch down into the soil, they become the perfect habitat for stag beetle larvae. They're my favourite insect, majestic and sadly increasingly rare and endangered.

Bark chip spreading in progress, a nice thick layer of them....

This is the bark chips all used. There is still a patch without them, I ran out ! The plan is to get more this week.

So that's the front flower bed mostly done. There are a couple of brambles right at the front that I still need to get at, and more bark chips to spread. But hopefully now it'll be lower maintenance, make out house look less like a squat when we have visitors, and still be a good habitat for insects and birds.

All photos in this post by me