Happy Christmas Jo!!

When we moved into our house (the move from rental land to mortgage joy), we had quite a blank canvas as a garden. It was lacking in plants, and really lacking in height, just one laburnum in the back left corner, and an elder in the back corner of our neighbours garden:



Summer 2008, we'd not done much to the back garden at this point

So we decided for our first Christmas in the house, we'd buy each other a tree... that was nearly 3 years ago (we moved in September 2007). Last summer I bought Eddy an apple tree, but we'd still not worked out exactly what tree I wanted, and more importantly where we'd put it. When our neighbours cut down the elder we realised we desparately needed some height... so we started to look at trees. I fancied something native, a silver birch or a rowan perhaps. Two weeks ago we were at our local nursery, which specialises in trees - and bought one of each!


Rowan tree
We planted the taller Rowan in the middle - and then replanted some montbretia around it - it really doesn't look like it was planted on Saturday!


Silver birch
The silver birch we bought was a much younger tree, so we planted it in the back corner, in a raised bed we are busy building. It's tucked in behind our raspberry canes (which are doing brilliantly this year), and will grow into the space well, we think.

We do spend a lot of our time (and money!!) in the garden - this year we have been busy cutting down the ivy growing in the laburnum tree (it now sways in the wind - compare it with the congested mass in the top photo!!), have dug and extra bed into the lawn and planted it up, started to de-turf on the other side - we are adding an archway half way up the lawn to divide the garden a bit. Oh, and our veggie patch (created last Easter) is doing great things this year!!



And that is why I never get as much stitching done as I'd hope at the weekend. But best of all, although Eddy does pretty much all of the hard work (de-turfing, heavy digging, construction etc), it's all activity points for me with weight watchers, which has really helped with my weight loss!

We've not really decided if the rowan or the birch is my tree - but they are both in our garden, so that doesn't really matter!!