Introducing the back garden

Again, it would have been much better if I'd thought to start this blog when the garden was still just a boring mass of paving slabs, but tis too late now.

Rather unfortunately, the greenery-hating previous owners had done a proper job with the back garden paving, so pulling up the slabs was not an option. We only managed to take one of them up (just below the stone wall on the left, containing silver birch sapling) and that took an entire day with a road-breaking drill, so doing the whole garden was not an option. Instead, I bought a load of limestone blocks and built some raised beds, which doesn't look too bad.

Along the fence to the left are a few wild roses (dogrose and sweetbriar) that should start scrambling through the trellis once it gets a bit warmer; there are also a couple of winter jasmine plants, a honeysuckle, a (very small) star jasmine), a clematis (Multi Blue) and a climbing hydrangea. Hopefully they won't all die again when the winter comes round - the back garden is on the north side and parts of it are completely in the shade for much of the year.

On the back wall I've put a few raspberry plants in, but the eventual aim is to have a Passionflower vine growing over that trellis. The big plant you can see on the back wall is a Buddleia, which had seeded itself in a tiny paving crack - it's nice for the butterflies so I've kept it. The box on the wall is a ladybird house (so far no ladybirds though).

In the darkest, shadiest corner of the garden there's a mini log garden, as recommended by my "Attracting Wildlife To Your Garden" book. The idea is to let some logs rot away in a corner, to provide a home for beetles and the like. The only difficulty here is keeping the less-wild wildlife away from the sticks, as a certain brown predator loves to steal them to play with...