Mrs Fox's Garden, Hertfordshire

The snail with the deformed shell that we allow to roam the rockery, he's been around for a few months now.

I posted the other week about our allotment and linked up to Mammasaurus' "How does your garden grow..." linky.  Well, I got a right ticking off from the garden.

What, not good enough for you?
Not flat enough, productive enough, edible enough, photogenic enough...?

You get the idea.  So, I thought I had better even it up with a post on the garden too.  How about a little tour.  Here, let me take you around in 5 quick steps, it's not a big garden:

1.  It isn't flat - One of the original negatives when we first saw our house is that our garden is on a steep slope.  The slope makes it rather hard to photograph.

The garden looking from the house to the studio at the back

Previous owners of our house terraced the garden with an awful lot of concrete. The concrete has meant a four year "greening up" process.  That is still on-going, hence the orange plastic fencing below.

The garden looking from the studio down to the house.

2.  The Pergola - As I mentioned to Jean (notsupermum) there is always a bit of a struggle between the garden and the allotment.  Time is never on your side with two small children, two small dogs and a small business to run.  But there is nothing I enjoy more than a sunny day, friends over for a meal, all of us sat out in the garden and the children running around like loons.  I love to cook, I love to eat (& drink a good wine) and I love to have had a hand in growing the things I eat.  The pergola has a grape vine growing over it, houses our garden table and chairs, providing shade on those (occasional) sunny days.  From the grapes we've made a just about palatable white table wine and from the vine leaves, dolma, that we make just as soon as the leaves are big enough. As you can see this year they've a bit of a ways to go yet.

3. The Studio - The garden is a constant source of creativity and inspiration.  So when we decided that the horror of a garage at the top of the garden should be knocked down and rebuilt as a smaller garage with a garden room, initially to be my studio.  I thought I had died and gone to heaven.

There she is in all her pristine glory, still not quite finished, but we all love the new garage/studio.  There is a playhouse for the children under the stairs, Storage under the balcony for all the gardening items and in the roof for everything else.  The balcony is a sun trap beloved by the dogs and wonderful for growing on my plants.

4.  The plants that rule the garden:  Aquilegia it has self-seeded into every nook and cranny in the garden, now so cross pollinated that I have no idea what colour any of it will come through, I enjoy the surprise. The common name for aquilegia is "columbine" which comes from the Latin for "dove", this is apparently due to the resemblance of the inverted flower to five doves clustered together (look a the pink one below to get what I mean).  Even though it is almost a weed in our garden I still love it, both the shape of the flower...

and the shape of the leaf, which reminds me of a ginko leaf.

5. The plants that rule the garden: - Forget-me-not before we had children we had Bilbo, our basset hound, he died four years ago and we were so bereft.  Our vet sent us a condolence card with a packet of forget-me-not seeds. They are now so abundant in our garden that they are in direct competition with the aquilegia for every one of those nooks and crannies.  While they may be small they are persistent, stubborn like our basset hound was.  And while they may not have the immediate impact of the aquilegia they have a tiny perfectness that I truly love.

For more beautiful pictures of gardens check out: