This year’s big project around the house and the garden will hopefully be a new retaining wall around the yard.
There is a sort of a wall there now, made of old railway sleepers. It was mostly rotten already in 2008 when we bought this place, and it has of course not grown any better since then. Some of the sleepers have crumbled, others have fallen down. There was a large birch tree (now gone) growing right through the middle of one of the sleepers.
Initially there was a diagonal lattice fence there as well, also rotten and falling to pieces and with sections of it missing. In fact the fence only stretched along two thirds the wall; the rest had probably disintegrated and been removed. We removed the rest of it in 2010 because it was in such bad shape and had large rusty nails sticking out here and there.
Inside the fence there were the beginnings of a hedge of alpine currant, quickly getting smothered by grass. We dug away the grass sward and put in some edging, pruned and fertilized and watered the hedge, and it grew nicely. Then it grew some more and then yet a bit more, and now it is wild, uneven and out of control.
Alpine currant is supposedly suitable for a free-form, unclipped hedge, and that’s what I was hoping to have here. A formal clipped hedge doesn’t fit the style I have in mind for our garden. According to sources, its mature height is supposed to be 100 to 150 cm, which sounded pretty good. But ours has grown way taller and wider than I had imagined, with the most vigorous parts definitely at the top of that range, and more. I guess it likes the conditions here.
Even though we have pruned it several times each season, the hedge is also overgrown and has collapsed in some parts under heavy winter snow, especially those parts that get a lot of sun and grow fast. All in all, it is in a sorry state. We need to cut it down to the ground and start over, pruning it even more often. But I don’t much like that plan: a clipped hedge is not what I want, and I also don’t particularly fancy the idea of being forced to prune the hedge on such a strict schedule or else face a repeat performance.
But now since the wall will get torn down anyway, and trying to build a new wall without damaging the hedge would be difficult and expensive, the decision was easy: the hedge goes. We get to start over and choose new bushes that will cooperate with my plan for a flowering, unclipped hedge, and not grow more than waist high.
I am somewhat annoyed that the previous owners of this garden planted a new hedge behind a rotten, crumbling wall, so obviously near its end of life. All of the work of planting the hedge and caring for it now gets thrown to the compost heap. But replacing the wall is an expensive project (as I am finding out) so I can understand why they did it.
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