To begin with, 4 years ago my husband and I bought a 30 hectare plot for permanent residence. Built a house, moved. And then I was overcome by an unbridled desire to create a garden of my dreams. How do I imagine him? This is a low-maintenance garden that does not require slavery on earth. In style - landscape, close to natural forms. There is no exotic, only plants that grow well in our conditions, without requiring specific care. I began to create such a garden, slowly, step by step, moving towards my goal. A lot has been done over the years, I have not avoided mistakes and alterations both in the layout and in planting.
A lot of "tooth-to-mouth", and then it turned out to be inappropriate and mercilessly eliminated with the replacement for something more interesting. The garden was changing, new functional zones appeared in it, adapting to me and my family. About how my garden was created, about the stages of transformation and the end of my efforts, I will try to tell now.
Preliminary zoning
Immediately after the completion of the construction of the house, we tentatively divided the land into zones.
Plot from the height of the second floor - almost all functional zones are visible, except for the playground
The first zone is a lawn, which is located at the entrance to the house. The lawn is framed by plantings - two flowerbeds and a large mixborder. We marked and made garden paths on the lawn, first made of stone, then converted them to wooden flooring.
You can learn more about how to make a neat lawn with your own hands from the material: //diz-cafe.com/ozelenenie/gazon-na-dache-svoimi-rukami.html
The lawn near the entrance to the house is the “front” zone of the site
The second important part of the garden is the playground. It is made on the basis of a former fire pond, long dried up, but remaining on our site.
A playground was built in the lowland where the fire pond used to be
The third zone is a small one, made for relaxation. Appeared by accident, as there was a piece of space near the site. Here we installed a small pond with a fountain and country furniture. The surface of the earth was covered with crushed stone, and to delineate the zone made around the path of wood.
Small relaxation area with a fountain - a place for morning relaxation with a cup of coffee
The fourth zone is the "kitchen". There is a hearth with a semicircular bench, a cart with a mini-garden, flower beds with conifers, hosts and fruit trees.
A lawn with a fireplace and a mini-garden on a cart plays the role of a “summer kitchen” on the plot
The fifth zone is a spa patio with a swimming pool. This zone was formed by chance and was originally planned as a rose garden. But, unfortunately, roses refused to grow there. The layer of clay, passing in the ground at a depth of about a meter, turned out to be the fault. Therefore, the water stagnated at the roots of the plants, they were chilled and did not bloom. Therefore, the rose garden was demolished and in its place was laid a wooden flooring connected to the paths.
In the center of the plot there is a wooden patio flooring, used in summer to relax by the pool.
Free space was left in its center, there we planted a spruce spruce "Hupsi" with beautiful blue needles. In adulthood, it should reach 10 m in height, which will be something to dress up for the New Year.
To plant the spruce, I had to dig a hole of 1.5x1.5 m to overcome the clay layer, and replace it with normal soil. Near the spruce, we set up an inflatable pool, a large umbrella, garden swings, deck chairs.
Hupsey spruce planted in the central part of the flooring
There is another zone, the sixth, until it is landscaped. At this place is a pit dug by the previous owners under the foundation of the house. But we built the house in another place, but the pit remained.
Plans to do a sports ground here. In the meantime, before global changes, I landed something around the perimeter. Along the fence, several tall narrow thuja varieties of Kolomna were planted in a row. They grow quickly, I hope they will close the neighbor’s fence soon. On the left, at our fence, 3 lilac bushes were planted. To the left and right of the pit, almost symmetrically, small mixborders of roses, blue spruce, spirea, willow and red hazel are organized.
The area is fenced off from the rest of the site by a raised flowerbed and trellised fence with a wicket. I initially planted a raised flowerbed with roses, but almost all of them died in the first winter. The flower bed turned out high, so everything froze. I had to exchange roses for mixed plantings of spherical spirae, cinquefoil, hydrangea, thistle, creeping juniper.
The not yet landscaped part of the garden is located behind a trellised fence with a wicket
Now that you have an idea of my site, I’ll tell you about its most significant objects. I will try to explain how they were made, what principles of landscaping and arrangement were used for this.
Playground
The playground is organized in the first pit remaining from a dried fire pond. It is always dry there, there is no wind, so you can walk there even in very unpleasant weather. To begin with, we added some fertile land there, leveled the slopes and the bottom. Wooden fences were placed around the perimeter of the pit.
In the first year, we brought in fertile land, poured it into the pit, leveled and installed supports
The very next summer, a lawn was sown, a descent made of limestone stone was made. The entrance to the site is decorated with a wooden arch.
Ideas for arranging a playground can be found in the material: //diz-cafe.com/postroiki/idej-dlya-obustrojstva-detskoj-ploshhadki.html
After installing the arch and the first play structures, the playground became our favorite place for games for our children
I designed the children's town myself, and the husband and the workers took over the incarnation. A whole complex was made with houses, slides, slopes, swings, a sandbox. The children (we have two of them) immediately appreciated our efforts, now they spend almost all their free time there.
The site has everything you need for games and outdoor activities for children.
Mixborder and front garden
The mixborder was broken on the left side of that lawn, which is located at the entrance to the house. The basis of the mixborder is conifers, they were first planted. Already in the first year of arranging the garden, we placed a pine, arborvitae, blue spruce, willow and several ferns brought from the forest.
In the beginning, conifers were planted in the mixborder, they create the shape, “skeleton" of the composition
And then several perennials were annoyed for mass. At first - nippon spiraea, panicle hydrangea, white derain, stonecrop visible, cuff. A little later - the bushes of the bladderwort “Diabolo” and “Aurea”, the Ottawa barberry, the maple “Flamingo”. For me, blueberries turned out to be an interesting plant, which in summer gives quite decorative and tasty berries, and in the fall - dyes foliage in carmine color.
Mixborder in the summer, during the flowering of perennials
Another plant group - the front garden - is planted on the left at the entrance to the house. Initially, I planted a black pine in the center, then around it I formed a composition of roses (floribunda and groundcover), lavender, clematis, and delphiniums. A girl’s grape started curling along the trellis.
The initial view of the front garden with black pine in the center
The next year, wanting more color, I planted phlox, dahlias and much more in the front garden. But in flowering, I did not like it.
The flowering of the front garden was too lurid, so I decided to change the composition of the plants
And in the fall I took up the alterations. Removed dolphiniums, dahlias. Replaced the black pine with a compact mountain pine and planted several fir trees. Added an Elimus.
The front garden in the thick foam of roses - this is how the composition looks now
To make life easier for us and to get rid of weed control, the front garden and all subsequent plantings were made using geotextiles. First, we removed the turf of the lawn on the bayonet of a shovel, poured fertile soil. Then they covered the ground with geotextiles, made a cross-shaped incision at the landing site and planted the selected plant there. Top geotextiles were mulched with pine wood chips. That's all. Wood chips look very organic, and there are almost no weeds.
Also useful will be material on how to use geotextiles in landscape design and gardening: //diz-cafe.com/ozelenenie/primenenie-geotekstilya.html
So that the plants of the front garden and flower beds do not crawl onto the lawn, the edges of the plantings were limited by a plastic border tape. A very practical thing - it does not rot, does not deform.
Other flower beds
I have several flower beds on the site. I will dwell on a few of them.
The lawn near the house is framed by two flower beds. One - near the well, on it were planted several large hosts, weeping larch, bushes of thistle, stonecrops, willow on the stem, and a buzulnik.
Start of creating a semicircular flowerbed, located on both sides of a wooden well
A semicircular flower bed limits the “front” lawn and creates a harmonious composition with a well
A similar semicircular flowerbed was broken on the opposite side of the lawn, adding bearded irises and large boulder stones there.
The second bed with hosts limiting the lawn from the opposite side
Two more flower beds are located on the lawn with a hearth (in the "kitchen" zone). The first is a semicircular flowerbed in the shape of a horseshoe that goes around the bench. Here I have many hosts - green and variegated. Irises are planted on them, yellow-white, thuja, sow thistle Spirea A young apple tree grows on the right side of the flower bed, and viburnum on the left on the left.
The hearth, surrounded by a stone retaining wall, is framed by a horseshoe-shaped flowerbed at the back.
Opposite it, another flowerbed framing the lawn, with wavy lines of the edges. Here felt felt, tulips, milkweeds, spruce, junipers are planted.
Flower bed with a wavy contour in the opposite part of the lawn from the source
Initially, the flowerbeds were fenced off with a border tape, then I changed it to a row of boulder stones, and then to curbs made of torn sandstone.
Borders for flower beds can be made from various materials, read more about this: //diz-cafe.com/dekor/bordyur-dlya-klumby-svoimi-rukami.html
Rockery - “stone motifs”
This is a miracle of landscape art I also have. It is located on the edge of the "kitchen" zone and is adjacent to one side of the wooden path-flooring.
Rockery - a flower bed with a stone dump and a "mountain" landscape
Probably, every owner of a summer cottage, keen on design, is not averse to creating a piece of a stone garden. The problem with such objects is that they are difficult to logically tie to the terrain. On many flat areas, the rocks that came from a hill and look up from nowhere look rather strange. Therefore, I decided not to make elevations noticeable to the eye, that is, slides, but to lay stones of different sizes in a natural mess. And in the midst of this elaborate chaos, planting plants.
I thought for a long time how to fit the rockery into the picture of the garden. And she decided to make it part of the composition, along the flooring track. On the one hand, it should "fall" into a raised flowerbed with hydrangeas and conifers, and on the other hand, into a regular flowerbed in the form of a horseshoe, surrounding the "kitchen" zone with a hearth. In order to somehow connect the rockery with a raised flowerbed, it is planned to put a wooden bridge between them.
The rockery was created as follows. On the lawn we marked outlines of the rockery, removed the turf on two bayonet shovels. Then they poured good soil into the deepening formed, covered it with geotextiles. They planned planting and made cross-shaped incisions at the locations of the plants. They planted Karelian birch, spurge, tunberg barberry, Japanese spire, cuff, juniper, thuja. Granite gravel was poured on top of the geotextile, pebbles were scattered over it and large boulders were laid out.
You can learn more about how to make a rockery with your own hands from the material: //diz-cafe.com/ozelenenie/rokarij-svoimi-rukami.html
A bridge linking the rockery with a raised flowerbed added a note to some Japanese flair to the garden. But, so that it does not look like a separate element, it was necessary to fit it into the landscape, somehow beat with stones, greens. I came up with the following. To the right of the bridge on a raised flowerbed there was already growing sow thistle, below it on the lawn I planted a dwarf Christmas tree "Lucky Strike". I really liked her for her clumsy twigs sticking out in different directions, giving her Japanese chic.
Christmas tree “Lucky strike” is located on the lawn on the right side of the bridge
To the left of the bridge, closer to the rockery, I planted an elimus bush (grate) with long blue leaves.
To the left of the bridge, the ears of corn reminiscent of the reed
Garden paths
I think the arrangement of the tracks in my garden may seem interesting. I will write about them too. We started making them out of stone. Laid out on half of the site, but somehow we did not like the look.
Stone paths at first seemed a good solution, but in the overall composition looked rude
We decided to redo it. They removed the stone, removed a layer of turf on the bayonet of a shovel. Sand was laid about 10 cm, granite crushed stone on top. Such tracks looked very personal! And for some time they lay in that form.
The only minus of crushed stone paths for my family was in the difficult passage of children's vehicles - cars, bicycles, strollers. Therefore, we decided to remake them on wood flooring paths. The logs were fixed in the rubble, covered with black resin for the prevention of decay.
It will also be useful material on the device of garden paths with their own hands: //diz-cafe.com/dekor/sadovye-dorozhki-svoimi-rukami.html
The logs were sheathed with pine boards, the lower side of which was treated with rot impregnation. The boards were sanded, sanded, thus leveling their surface and removing sharp corners. After that, they painted the flooring with a composition for wood on a wax basis, "Belinka" dark color in 2 layers.
Every year or two paths must be repainted, then there will be no problems with them
It turned out that wooden walkways have a lot of advantages. They are not slippery, and even if you fall, you will not hit hard. The tree is always warm and dry - we made gaps between the boards through which the water that fell on the flooring immediately goes into the gravel. In this form, our paths have been standing for 3 years - no rot!
At this stage I will end the story. My garden, as a living creature, will still grow and change. But the main objects already exist and so far suit me. Most importantly, the result is pleasing to the eye. In addition, the daily care of such a garden is not too complicated, I manage it myself, sometimes I connect my husband. What is needed? Water, trim where necessary, fertilize, sometimes transplant. This is all that is needed to keep the garden healthy, pleasant and a comfortable place to relax for my family.
Alina
