I don’t think I’ve ever given a garden tour on here – I’m a bit rubbish at that sort of thing. I always want things to be finished and perfect before I show anyone, but of course gardens are never finished and never perfect. So today I’m going to show you around the fairy garden.
When we first moved into Rose Cottage, it was the garden that attracted me. There’s a decent sized front garden but the back is massive. It was on three levels with a path running down the middle.
To make it a little more manageable, we split it into four separate gardens, each with a more pretentious name than the last 😂. We have the terrace (patio), the play garden (lawn, raised beds and a play house), the orchard (a large lawn with about a dozen fruit trees and berry bushes and the fairy garden (a mass of wild flowers and roses).
The fairy garden used to be home to the chickens. I was so sad when we made the difficult decision to re-home them. For two years they tore up their space and filled our days with silliness. When we dropped them off at my friend Emma’s, I could hardly look at their garden. It sat there for the whole winter – a bare rectangle of mud and straw, with an empty chicken shed formerly known as The Coopa Cabana.
had lockdown not happened, I would probably have sulked over it for longer. But it did and I didn’t. Once the shed was gone, Phill rotavated the ground and we began.
We moved a few larger shrubs from elsewhere in the garden – some hydrangeas, astilbe, bay and rosemary. And then…I went a bit bonkers with seeds.
I must have put a dozen or so packets of seeds in this garden aswell as a box or two of wildflower seed mix.
In the beginning there was a difficult phase when flower seedlings were popping up, but so were weeds and grass. It was tricky to know what to pull out of the ground. For the most part I just let things grow a little longer.
You can see that we over-seeded some areas! And some could have done with a few more seeds.
You can also see that our next project needs to be a proper path instead of the stepping stones!
We added a fairy house and an old bench which I sprayed a pale blue.
One day Dottie and I were cleaning up the patio and poured out a bucket full of rainwater. We thought it was just water but when a dozen or so frogs jumped out, we realised we’d made a terrible error. Having destroyed their buckety house, we decided to make amends by creating a little wildlife pond out of an old tin bath.
We placed it in a shady spot under the cherry tree and next to a pile of logs we’d set up for little animals and creepy crawlies. There’s a low bench there too, from which we hope to spot as much wildlife as possible.
With all the sun and rain we’ve had, the fairy garden has gone a bit silly! I feel like we’re nearing the time when we should chop the whole thing back but I just can’t bring myself to do it! Not when there are still so many beautiful flowers in there. I’m sure it will be even more magical next year.
Love Rachel ❤️
Update. Here’s what the fairy garden looks like a year on from the day we threw the first packet of seeds on the ground!
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