Farmhouse Garden Makeover

We’ve been building the cottage-style garden at the farmhouse for two years. It’s been a lot of work but we can finally see the garden starting to take shape. It’s becoming established around the trees that we here when we moved in and is developing that overgrown cottage feel we love. Except for the circle bed in front of the house! That looks more like a barren wasteland. I love the circle bed and the Box hedge around the perimetre. But the interior of the garden bed has never looked the way we want it to. We’ve tried a variety of plants. Nothing grows except bulbs (and even they haven’t been as prolific this year.) So, we decided it was time for a garden makeover. Here’s what we did.

A Plan for our Garden Makeover

Before we did anything to the garden we stepped back and took a good look at what we were working with. We knew we needed to make a plan. The shape of the garden is one we like. We also like the weeping tree we planted in the centre and the Box hedging. These are growing well and we had no intention of removing them.

However, at one side of the bed, there was a large clump of bulbs. Daffodils, Jonquils, some kind of lily and an orange tiger lily plant that takes over everything and makes the circle appear lopsided. These plants were remnants from the garden that was there before. Nothing else but snapdragons and some cosmos seemed to grow.

After consideration, we decided to mimic the circle hedge by planting smaller circles inside the garden bed. This is a more formal look than our other garden beds but we thought it would create a statement to be seen on entry to the garden. The first circle would consist of a mass planting of one of our farvourite farmhouse plants: lavender. We would then re-plant the bulbs in a more orderly way, situating them inside the lavender circle.

Gavin also wanted some violets to create a carpet in the centre under the tree.

Preparing the Bed for the New Look

We commenced the garden makeover by preparing the bed for a new look. First, we weeded the garden and dug up the old plants. This took longer than planned as the garden is extremely sodden from a large amount of rain we’ve had over winter.

Most of the bulbs were caked in mud and, we discovered, planted far too deeply. A layer of mulch is a good thing but ours was around 30cm deep! This may have been the reason the bulbs were not flowering and the ground was so wet.

We dug up the bulbs and sorted them into types. Then, I split the bulbs and we set about replanting them in empty beds around the rest of the garden. Our climate is such that we don’t have to dig up bulbs after flowering. We simply wait until they are spent, take off the dead leaves and they will flower again the following year.

I laid the bulbs that were left in a circular pattern around the garden bed. Tall irises in the very centre, then daffodils in yellow and white. This will create circles of blue and yellow next Spring. We left the lupins that had seeded themselves in the centre too.

A Trip the the Nursery

While Gavin was finishing the preparation of the bed for our garden makeover, I made a trip to the nursery. I couldn’t resist these purple dwarf lavender so I bought ALL the stock they had on hand! The bees LOVE blue and purple and as soon as we unloaded the plants from the car they appeared. I also found a supply of ranunculus that were in bloom so I stocked up on those for our cut flower garden. We divided the pots as we planted, putting all the pink ones in our garden and the rest out in the cut flower garden.

The next step was to stake the bulbs. This is not something we would normally need to do, but the plants had been so deep under the ground they would not stay upright once we planted them in their new positions. The iris are about to flower, so I wanted to give them every chance to do so. We finished our garden makeover with a layer of fertiliser.