Rediscovering My Garden

     After seven years of curling up like a cat in the afternoon sun on a kitchen chair in the west facing window of my kitchen we finally bit the bullet and turned our tiny, windy but sunny patio into a sun room.  The patio got all the sun but it was either too windy to sit out and when it was sunny it had no shade.  Just before Christmas 2013, out of the blue, my husband of 25 years said, "Have your sun room" and we weren't even talking about sun room, houses or anything remotely to do with bricks or sun.  I was stunned. Then I got scared. How does someone get to the 'mature' age of 50 and never participated in a building project. 

     This was the first house we ever owned after having lived in an apartment for the last 20 years.  It was a palace compared to the lunch box we lived in for the first eight years of our marriage with two babies in nappies.  Building on an extra room which we didn't really need seemed wrong. 

     I googled the cost of building sun rooms in Ireland and was staggered to find the minimum cost is 20k and can go up to 40k; we're only talking about building one extra room.  We got quotes from six different builders and settled for the middle road.  Work started in the middle of February and barring one dodgy velux window it was all finished by the end of April. 

     The finished sun room is such a fantastic use of an awkward, under utilized space that we were left are reeling as to why we had not done this before.  Originally it was intended to be 9 feet wide and 16 feet long as we did not want to encroach into the garden and take up valuable space for football. However, since Hubbie insisted the builder re cycle the old patio door it forced the builder to go out an extra five feet and so it is 21 feet long and what a difference!!  That extra 5 feet actually makes the room.  It is like sitting in the garden without that pesky wind but you also get the benefit of looking at the garden with the heat of the sun and the sound of the rain.  It my favourite place in the whole world to be no matter what the weather.  To be fair we have so far only experienced it in summertime, winter might bring a whole other range of 'challenges' or delights.  Hubble and the boys have gone from 'Mum has gone mad' to 'what a great room'.  So far I have only furnished it with a two seater couch borrowed from the bat cave and the dresser because there is simply no where else to put it but it fits in fine.  The builder gave the room a pitched roof and it has the glorious effect of making the room bright, airy and almost like a little chapel.  All I need is stained glass and a crucifix.

     I did not have fixed ideas of how I wanted the room to look other than it had to have as many windows as possible, we had access to the garden and that it would be as bright as possible.  Our budget was tight and immovable but as it happens that was a God send.  My neighbour who very kindly allowed me to view her sun room which she had built four years ago had the entire gable end in glass.  The builder said glass is more expensive than brick so we have a low window ledge instead of glass and I prefer that.  It makes the room more like a room than a glass house and with our long, wet winters it will make the room cosier and less bleak.  As a result we got a room at slightly more than half the cost but exactly suits our needs. 

     My mantra since I started working with college students and their mammies is 'Open heart, Open mind' and I find that gets me through every encounter with difficult people and situations.  Our builder is a Sweetie but they say that the top most stressful events in life is moving house.  The Chinese have a curse, 'May you build' and I put that in the same category.  Everyone has their horror story. Once I told people I was building and even though they were usually pleased with the finished product, they all cursed builders.    My builder came highly recommended by people I trust and once we discussed what I wanted from this room, I told him he was free to do what he thought was fit with the budget we agreed.  I stood back.  Luckily I work and so I was out of the house all day.  The boys were at school and Hubbie was at work.  Once they broke through the connecting wall from the kitchen to the potion, I would come home every day at 6 pm and find a layer of dust over everything.  This lasted for about two weeks.  You clean up, cover up as much as possible and stay patient.  The garden lay under bags of cement and slabs of concrete bricks.  Before the building started the garden was just a scrubby little football pitch prone to flooding so how it looked meant nothing to me.  I just drew the blinds and was thankful it was February.

     I had planted a Pyracanthus outside my north facing kitchen window; the one I look out of when I am washing the dishes.  I wanted something evergreen and fast growing and that tolerated shade.  It is a brave little shrub.  I've since discovered that the side passage of our house is a wind tunnel and the gales that go howling through there in January are terrifying.  If it's not tied down or locked in the shed it gets blown away.  Our two huge wheelie bins have been over turned and ended out in the front garden many times.  My Adirondack chairs make of solid oak have been tossed like tumble weeds across the back garden.  I had the Pyracanthus tied to a pathetic trellis and during the building the winds brought the whole thing down.  The poor Pyracanthus swayed out from the wall at a 45 degree angle bullied by the relentless winds.  I saw it in the morning before I went to work but I neither had the time nor the wherewithal to fix it.   When I got home that evening it was dark and so it was not until the following Saturday morning that I discovered that one of the builder's men had used huge masonry nails and wired the trellis and the Pyracanthus upright again.  When I tested its firmness, it was solid and immovable. Crude it was but I was gratified by the simplicity and no nonsense cure.  When I mentioned it to builder he was surprised.  I am grateful by the kindness of one of his workers simply fixing something because it was broke.

     This started out as a description of how I got back into gardening after a six year gap of apathy and turning my back on an asset.  Once the sun room was finished and we hauled the two seater from the bat cave and situated facing the sun and the garden, I fully appreciated how bare the garden is and how little privacy we have.  We are over looked on three sides.  The neighbours on either side can see in as much as I can see into theirs which isn't a lot but you still prefer if they couldn't.  The house at the end of the garden is side on and have two windows fully over looking.  Somehow all these years that never bothered me but then I never sat out in my garden.  I now want to sit in my sun room and planned to do so for the rest of my days.  Young boys live there and they could care less.  The adults have a life but the point is that they can and I wanted to prevent that.

     Putting up trellis is expensive requiring drills and nails that my husband is not capable of doing.  I don't trust my sons.  I have a a lot of enthusiasm to start with but always run out of interest before the job is completely done.  Example the sun room.  I painted it and the kitchen at the same time.  The newly dried plastered inhaled paint and it took eight tins and it could still have done with another coat but I got no help from my family, my neck hurt, I was worn out and I was bored.  I settled for the mottled look and a promise to do it all again next spring with the same colour paint if it was available. Jasmine White from Dulux.  Remember that.

     I put up two weedy little trellis in 2006 in a burst of enthusiasm and attempted to grow jasmine and clematis on a north facing wall.  They struggled; I lost interest and forgot I had them until the builder put them at the end of the garden.  Our battery operated drill is useless: it wouldn't scratch paint.  John is our postman at work but even more interesting he is also a farmer; he knows everything.  I asked to borrow his drill.  He hesitated and suggested I use picture hooks - you know the white plastic ones with the four tiny nails on top.  I told him that was insane.  He replied, "Your walls at home are made of concrete, why wouldn't they work outside as well?"  I couldn't argue with that so on the way home I bought a pack of 25 of their largest picture hooks.  I had mixed success.  The blocks are not pure concrete. Sometimes the cement like substance crumbled where it couldn't take the hammering and in other spots I hit gold and the hook held.  I ran gardening wire up and down the wall from hook to hook.  I had 100% success with my Clematis Armani outside my kitchen window.  I didn't take a picture before clematis but here is a picture after with clematis rampant.  Here is another picture of hooks where I planted roses but the roses never took off which is why the hooks and wires are still visible.  Now this works fine for light weight vines it was not so successful with the trellis.  While also at the hardware shop I found masonry nails and over heard two men who I guessed to be in their 20's discussing the merits of each nail and asked them was it possible to put a nail into concrete without a drill and they said you can simply hammer them in.  Music to my ears.  I bought a pack of 50.  The trick with hammering in nails is to find just a glimmer of a gap in the concrete.  Hubbie had painted the wall but I could still detect holes where the paint did not fill.  I tapped gently and once I felt the nail take then I would steadily increase the blows until a few good whacks sent the nail in until only a half inch protruded.  I hung the trellis off a series of nails like this and then secured the trellis with wire stretched from one nail to another or a picture hook.  It looks awful.  Something a five year old would attempt but from the kitchen window you can't tell the difference.  Up close is a picture.  I reckoned once things start actually growing and using this thing then it will cover up the flaws and if the trellis loses firmness I'll whack another nail in.  By then I may have lost interest and moved on to something else.  The only thing about the nails and hammer 'technique' the vibrations going up the nail hurt my hands and I had to wrap tissue around the nail to absorb the tremors.  If you have a husband with a drill and knows how to how to use it, you are lucky.  If you have a drill and are willing to use it, you have my fullest respect.

Renewed interest in the garden.

     My friend Carmel suggested planting willow trees.  They sounded boring so I ignored that suggestion.  The following Saturday the Examiner had a full page article raving about the benefits of the willow tree.  I rang Carmel  and asked did she still have the willows.  She did.  That was the 18th February.  Her husband Mike (raised on a farm - I'm telling you, they know everything) had coppiced the willow the previous weekend and he had a stack of 8 foot long canes.  He chopped them up into foot long stumps and threw in a few fuchsia stumps which had rooted.  He said you simply drive the willow stumps into the ground at least 8 inches apart.  Each stump will root and you will have a tree with shoots about 8 feet high by the end of the summer.  I didn't believe him but I planted them anyway as instructed.  Today is the 20th July.  Every single one of them rooted and they have shoots at eye level with me.  I am five foot tall so they have another two months to reach their potential.  Even the stumps I did not planted rooted in the bucket and so feeling bad for them I planted them on the side of the house facing north and overlooked and so getting no sun whatsoever are completely in the shade and guess what? They are growing.  Nowhere near as fast as steady as the ones in the sun but growing all the same.  Privacy is an issue for me.  Thank God for Google.  I researched the things you can do with willow trees and I came across coppicing and excaplier.  The latter is for fruit trees but I liked the principle of long stem and all the activity on top.  This frees the ground level for prettier more interesting plants while occupying the upper area for screening.  The three best thriving willows are being groomed for their canes and I have at least six good specimens.  Next February maybe the 18th for good luck, I will prune those canes.  Dig up the original willow stumps, work over the soil to be free of weeds and grass and then plant the canes the way I did with the original stumps.  The idea is the shoots will come from the top of the cane which will act as my screen blocking out the two windows.  Having trees right in the front of the windows will be clumsy and obvious so I plan to plant 8 for symmetry four on either side of my super Rosa.  I will have to clear out my Montbrecia which is gorgeous at the moment and luckily seems to survive anything.  The fuchsias I will take out and put back once the willows are established.  I feel like Dr Evil plotting the overtaking of the world but it is only the bottom of my garden which is about 25 feet wide.  I really should get a life.

     I was on the hunt for vigorous evergreen climbers, vigorous climbers would do too.  When I worked in Kentish Town in London in the 90's the head office was in a prefab.  The handyman John planted a Russian Mile a Minute outside the kitchen window.  That thing grew a foot a day and Kitty the tea lady cursed the fact it crept in the window no matter how much John hacked it back.  I was fascinated by a plant that grew so pushy.  When I read the description that it was aggressive and unfussy and thrived in poor soil, that was my kind of plant. I bought one a few years ago and planted in the shady corner where the sun simply never reaches.  It grew steadily enough.  But then we went on holidays and when we returned two weeks later it had grown into a monster.  It ransacked the fence and the wall I was delighted.  I love pruning.  I can't help it but when I see a thing grow I have the urge to cut it back. It might be to do with the fact that I was defender on my GAA football team.  I had no interest in scoring I just wanted to stop anyone else doing it.   I snip at it every day when all else is quiet and it always gives me something to do.  It's very difficult to get rid off or so the BBC gardening website promises but my middle son succeeded.  He only ever cuts the grass when he wants money which means it could be cut three times a week or three times a month depending on his needs.  He shows no discrimination and mows everything.  He destroyed a thriving azalea, a newly planted rhubarb corm and my magnificent Mile a Minute.  Like the Wicked Witch of the East, it shrivelled and died.  The stump is still there but no life. 

     This spring with my renewed interest and zero patience for results and progress - they say gardening teaches you patience but the garden does what it pleases and you realise how little patience you actually have - I decided to buy another Mile a Minute.  I tried five different garden centres around Cork, good respectable ones but none of them had it.  One Centre went through the farce of ordering it for me but it wasn't 'included in the delivery'.  After weeks of doing the rounds finally one Centre Manager confessed that they will never stock it the since they are so aggressive.  I asked her to order it anyway and I would buy the entire order and she still refused.  She then suggested that if I saw it growing in a friend's garden to ask to take a cutting.  I never thought of that but then I never saw this plant in a friend's garden.  There is a magnificent specimen growing over the The Star pub on Capwell and another one overhanging the link on the bridge.  I work in UCC and I asked the gardener.  He said it wasn't on the grounds but I could have a cutting of the evergreen jasmine in July.  Leaving work one evening by the Gaol Cross gate I saw a vine poke through the railing.  It looked like a young Mile a Minute.  I photographed it with my phone and compared it to Google images, they matched.  The next day I brought in rooting gel, plastic bag and secatures.  I took in all 9 cuttings and two of them took.  I am now the very delighted owner of two growing vines.  I found the gentler sister in Hanley and it is growing well up a swingball pole I recycled but it is no where as fast as the Russian.  It is plants like these that make gardening satisfying.  You can keep your petunias and summer annuals I want rocket plants.  If you walk along the corridor in UCC by the Aula Max you can see Ivy growing through the windows and it's enchanting.  The Virginal creeper is allowed to grow over and around the diamond paned windows gradually blocking out the sunlight and it is very pretty.  Some ivy founds its way through the gaps in the panes and is hanging down on the inside.  Now that is my kind of plant.