After several false starts the landscaping finally began in July 2021. The contractor came the day after we came back from our family holiday in Cornwall.
21 July 2021
22 July 2021
3 August 2021
11 August 2021
20 August 2021
27 August 2021
Hooray! After 6 weeks of chaos the contractors have gone and the hard landscaping is done. We were told the job would take one week so we are a little cross that it has dragged on so long and it has been hard having a mud pile for a garden while the children have been off school for the summer holidays. 
We were supposed to have the job done for one week in May which would have allowed us to enjoy the garden this summer. COVID caused problems with getting materials and pushed all the timescales back several times.
The summer is over here now so we won't get much use out of the garden or be able to plant it up until next year but I'm really happy with how it looks and I'm already mentally arranging the plants I haven't yet bought 
I'm happy that the diagonal design and height from the pergola deceive the eye into thinking the garden is bigger than it is. We no longer feel hemmed in and the pergola distracts the eye from the neighbouring windows which makes us focus in the garden and somehow makes it feel cosier. When he got home from school my eldest son asked if the garden had got bigger! 
We laughed and said yes, we moved all the fences when the neighbours weren't looking!
We brought just 6 plants with us to this house:
1. A hellebore that I've had for more than 10 years. Back then we owned a little garden and this was one of the stars. I love it's deep purple flowers every February that persist on the plant well into April. A growing family meant we had to sell up our teeny house and rent for a while. We dug this beauty up and took it with us (well, half of it. I gave half to my mum as it needed dividing). It was planted in the rented garden and too late we realised the garden was riddled with bindweed that tried to strangle everything. We rescued it into a container where it lived for the next 6 years. I will not put it into the ground here for fear a tiny piece of bindweed root lurks in that pot somewhere. After 6 years battling that weed that seemingly grows a foot overnight I'm not keen for a repeat performance.
2. Heuchera can can. This was bought to brighten up the rented house border but suffered the same bindweed fete so was potted up and now lives quite happily in a terracotta pot. Again this has a DO NOT PLANT OUT order on its head because of the bindweed.
3. Honeysuckle Rhubarb and Custard. This is a short growing variety bought from a garden show we attended in 2019. It was supposed to be good in containers - we had abandoned all hope of growing in the ground at this point. In reality I have found it to be quite sickly in a container so we have just planted it in the ground here. It is on its last chance to prove it is worth keeping.
4. A shocking pink patio rose. I wish I could remember the name of this lovely rose we bought at the same flower show in 2019. It lives in a container and absolutely flowered it's socks off last year.
5. 2 potted Japanese acers. The largest red one is about 15 years old and is my husbands pride and joy.
With only these plants our garden looked a bit sad early last year. In the rented house there were a lot of mature shrubs we had gotten used to. Our new garden looked very stark in comparison. On the way back from school one morning I saw the house builders starting to demolish the sales office and surrounding landscaping ready to build the last couple of houses on the lot. They were digging up plants with a JCB and dumping them on the pavement ready for the skip 
I asked if I could take some home. 10 minutes later I was back with a wheelbarrow. Here they are potted up and hanging out in the pegged out garden design. Already looking more like a garden!
2 x osmanthus heterophyllus goshiki were the star finds. These evergreens have looked lovely ever since. Also got a choisya sundance, some sort of cistus, a viburnum and a spindly looking euonymus. You can see all of them in this picture.
After moving in to the house in October 2020 I spent the winter trying to decide on a design for the garden. Lots of sticks, string and random objects were used to mark out potential designs.
I wasn't happy with any of them. 
The garden sloped from the back towards the house. The back fence pointed into the garden like an arrow. The garden was almost twice the width at the house end as at the back fence. All the configurations that lined the garden up with the house looked wrong somehow. I then tried slicing the garden in line with the wonky back fence rather than in line with the house. This looked more promising 
By this time it was April 2021. Turning the garden on a diagonal gave me ideas to run with. I could picture raised beds, a pergola, lots of climbing plants. Time to sketch
What a weird shape!
Happy with the sketch I decided to make a 3d mock up of the idea in my head using freebie software I found on the internet.
Now to find someone to do the hard landscaping. I love my plants but I'm no DIYer unfortunately.
Just before the pandemic hit we bought a new house that was under construction. Lockdown slowed everything up meaning we didn't get a finished house until October 2020. A brand new house comes with a daunting blank canvas of outdoor space (albeit a tiny space!) I intend for this blog to document the transformation from boring awkward shaped plot to what I hope will be a vibrant garden.
July 2020: Checking on progress of house and seeing garden for first time. Before fences between us and neighbours had gone in
Part building site, part farmers field
Oct 2020: Fences up so we can see the weird shaped plot in all its glory
