After a few years of focused effort, the front of the garden is starting to look pretty good, even though there is plenty more lawn there, waiting to be replaced with better things.

Ingrid has been complaining a bit about how bare and boring some parts of the back garden are, especially those that we see every day from the living room and the wooden deck. I agree. So this season I’ll be switching focus to spend more time on that area. (Part 4 in this sketch that I made in 2012.)

I’ve simply been procrastinating until now because I don’t know how to approach it. It feels complicated.

Firstly, it’s very shady since it’s surrounded by large trees on most sides. And instead of grass, the ground is covered by moss. You can see all the brown patches in the photo. The moss doesn’t bother me, but it makes me suspect that it might be more difficult to get other things to thrive there.

On top of that, a good chunk of this area has a very thin layer of soil. Adrian and I poked around today with a digging bar to see what we have to work with. The arrangement of sticks in the ground in the photo above is actually our markers of places where the soil is at least 30–40 cm deep, so there’s room to plant a normal potted bush. There’s quite a large area to the right of the sticks where I kept hitting rock after just 15 cm or so. I think there’s a single large, contiguous chunk of rock down there.

This whole area needs bushes for fullness and volume, not just pretty little things on the ground. It’s too open right now. My current vague idea is that I could cut section 4 in two parts, right along the imaginary line between the cypress on the left, and the bird cherry and mahonia on the right. Plant some bushes next to the cypress on the left, plant some more next to the bird cherry on the right, and leave a passage in between. Like this:

The right-hand side wall of the passage would continue in a curve, with some tallish bushes that look good from a distance, from where we sit on the deck. In front of and around the cypress and its future companions, some pretty, colourful things to look at. Peonies, maybe.

The new section 4b, beyond the passage, will then be less important since it will be less visible. There’s an apple tree there right now. Maybe I can somehow squeeze in a plum tree there somewhere? Blackcurrant bushes, maybe?