Cottage Garden

The last few weeks have seen good progress with building the front garden wall. Whilst it can be as frustrating as a huge jigsaw puzzle, it is mostly very satisfying to see order and form emerging out of a random pile of rock. It's also great to start to see a defined boundary at the front of the garden, where it's been a blurred edge or tarmac and soil for months.

It'll be a while yet before it's complete and can we can think about replanting, but even so the self sown aquilegia and valerian are in full bloom and are doing their bit to make it look like a real cottage garden. It's not a style that we were thinking of using, but the contrast this will provide to the italian courtyard at the rear of the house seems to work. So when we do get to the fun stage of buying plants or seeds it'll definitely be for cottage style but with some unusual plants in the mix. Thankfully this is what my sister specialises in at her plant nursery Tinnisburn Plants, so I know what'll be on my list of things to collect when we visit in August.

Mind you, that's assuming she doesn't sell all her stock at Gardening Scotland this weekend!

It's a sign!

Last October, whilst on holiday in Cornwall, we stumbled across a manufacturer of house signs, coasters and clocks that grabbed our attention. www.ashortwalk.com use recycled coffee cups to make contemporary products that look as if they've been riven from slate when they are infact a made from waste material. Recycling at it's best.

With us making good progress at the front of the house we thought it was now time to get a new sign for Hillside, and this is what turned up in the post on Friday courtesy of Ashortwalk:



Okay, so there is already a stone at the front of the house with 'Hill Side Cottage 1905' carved into it, but it's at first floor level and seems to be out of most peoples line of sight. The number of callers we have at the door who ask if the house is anything but Hillside confirms this.

So hopefully, once we've put the new name sign at the front of the house we'll stem the regular flow of delivery men looking for some other property. We'll see.

Wall

The record breaking dry weather has encouraged us to carry on with work outside, despite there being indoor jobs that we'd planned to do. Think they'll have to wait till the weather turns wet.

So we've been able not only to complete the new steps up to the house from the pavement, but also start rebuilding the front wall. Using a combination of stone from the original wall that we rescued from the builder before he removed it, along with rubble from our friend's garden, we have managed to make good progress with the new wall. We're not skilled or experienced enough to build a dry stone wall, so we are resorting to a semi-dry wall with some mortar used to give it strength but it wont be fully pointed. Hopefully this will mean it is in keeping with the local vernacular rubble walls and wont look out of place, whilst also being structurally sound.