A weekend transformation

Recently I wrote about the plans for my friend’s child-friendly jungle garden. Well, the day was going to come at some point when we needed to get going with digging it out and planting it up, and here we are. We had to move a huge number of plants across London, and my friend decided she was more than happy to spend a fair bit of money on mature specimens to get the garden looking as good as possible as quickly as possible, rather than all small and forlorn. So I hired a van, and we piled it up with some really truly gorgeous big plants. The last time I did this, I was filling a van with books and some chipped furniture after finishing my PhD. Now everything was a great deal more grown up.

When we got back to the garden, we had a dug-out site waiting for us. This was pretty exciting. My friend had really gone to town with the ‘rainforest shelter’: she’d managed to get planning permission for a basement to go in and a garden building. This looked very smart and means they now have a self-contained flat out there for friends to stay in, or an elderly relative if that situation arises. We’ve planted around the building with an ornamental vine, a passionflower and an evergreen clematis, which really will make it and the rest of the garden look like a leafy haven.

The children were away for the weekend and we had a couple of strong-armed friends to help us unload the plants from the van. The planting took two days solid. It was incredibly hard work. The planting holes were huge because these were mature specimens, required back-filling with a great deal of water and well-rotted manure, and we sprinkled all the roots with mycorrhizal fungi as well to help the plants get really established. The planting holes also had blood, fish and bone added, just to make sure.

When the children returned, the bones of the jungle garden had flesh on them. There were plants there too. What a wonderful transformation in a weekend.

In association with AnyVan.

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