The Garden

The Garden

We've been doing a lot of work in our garden. Including replacing large sections of the fences, moving the pond and planting new trees.

See photographs in my Yahoo photo album for the work in progress. Photographs of the Garden.

The dilemma that I have now is that one stretch of the garden boundary is completely covered in ivy, which I hate; it's full of wasps nests and gross bugs, not to mention loads of snails. Anyway, I'd like to get rid of the ivy and replace the fence, however, the ivy contains a fair number of bird nests and if I remove it I will no longer have lots of little birds nesting in the garden.

This year the nests have included: robins (two clutches), dunnocks (fledged last week and there appear to be at least five fledglings), wrens (they fledged this week and there were four of them). I used to get a lot of sparrows nesting as well but they seem to have forsaken my garden this year.

We have talked about putting up some bird boxes, but I think most of the species would prefer the ivy. This might mean having to sacrifice a very good plum tree (currently choked by ivy and in the middle of the nesting area) and waiting until the fence falls down before replacing it. Hmmmm, tough call.

One successful piece of work was the resiting of the pond. The pond used to be in the middle of one of the sections of patio, rendering the patio practically useless for sitting on. We have moved the pond closer to the house and paved over the old pond area to create a lovely large area of patio on which we can now sit and enjoy the sun all day and on until the middle of the evening and we have also sited our new pool on this area of patio.