Rethinks!

I've been having a week of rethinks.  

Did I tell you I was planning to tile an outside wall?   I had a very solid plan in my head about how it should look but unfortunately the tile world is not in step with my thinking.  Colourful is not 'in' at the moment and I do love a bit of colour in my life.  Anyhow, as I was perusing the internet as you do I came across some tiles on Ebay that were very different from what I had in my head but they are porcelain which means they can survive low or high temperatures and they are 'different'.  I've ordered one tile!!  Yes, just the one because I don't want to spend money on something thats not exactly what I want.  I don't mean I don't want it, it looks good online but sometimes these things are not quite as good when you see them in real life and they are £15 each.  Now, my plan is to buy (if I like the first one) 4 more, all different and just place them randomly among some plain navy tiles.  The one I've bought so far is a picture from Alice in Wonderland.  They have others, some William Morris (I'm thinking a unicorn) and some Peter Rabbit.  They are colourful enough to satisfy that need and I like that they will be interesting to look at too.  Fingers crossed but it also means I'll probably not be able to do this job till either much later this year or next spring as the one I've ordered won't arrive until the 20th August as they fire them to order so if this one is all I hope for then the next four won't come till late September.  We sometimes get a dry spell in early October so I'm hoping for then, assuming I can now source some plain navy tiles!

This photo shows my blue Agapanthus and another recent purchase of a Salvia plant.

Another rethink is my garden.  My old schoolfriend who lives in Manchester paid us a surprise visit this week.  She and her husband were up to visit her son who lives near Edinburgh and they had a few hours with no plans and wondered if they could visit.  We had lunch and a lovely afternoon in the garden and she asked to look round the garden and as I toured with her I looked with new eyes at it and decided it  was decidedly overgrown and a bit boring!  

My front garden is very much a spring garden.  It has loads of spring bulbs, azaleas, etc that all flower in spring and it looks amazing from March till May but then for the whole summer, although its very green it has little in the way of flowers which means I don't have to worry about watering it.  The back garden is very much an early summer garden.  It looked spectacular until about two weeks ago then it all died back almost as one and now there is little of interest to see.  I've also allowed my perennial geranium to take over the garden.  I always justified it because it remains in flower for most of the summer and hides any weeds and doesn't need much in the way of watering however, it is also very untidy and I realised as I looked around it was everywhere and was quite boring!   I plan to keep some of it as I actually like it but I'm getting rid of quite a lot of it.  With this plan in my mind I called my mum and asked if she wanted a trip to the garden centre which she did and off we went.  I bought two perennials, an Agapanthus and  a Penstemon.  Both are fairly mature and I hope they will spread a bit more once they settle into the garden.  I already had some perenials in tubs as they were very immature plants and I didn't want to lose them in the garden so they will join the new plants too.  This afternoon was lovely here so I sat in the sun and pulled out the roots of the geraniums and exhausted myself!  Clearly they have been in there for a long time and the roots were fighting to stay put!  I eventually managed to clear quite a large area, there is more to do but I cleared enough to plant the new plants and I'm very pleased with it.   It was testiment to the dry summer we've had though that the soil was bone dry down to at least 6 inches deep so I gave it a good soaking even though rain is forecast here for tomorrow.  I have a few more very small perenials growing in pots and I will transpant them to the new and improved part of the garden when I can get more of the roots out and as the weather forecast for the next few days is not great, it might be a while yet.  But I'm glad to have made a start on one of my rethinks!

The photo above shows the Penstemon in place and I discovered a Wallflower hidden in the Geranium!

This is how the garden looked before.  To be fair, just a week or so ago it was covered in pink flowers and looked much nicer than this however I'm sure you can see that I really did need to see my garden with slightly better vision!