Garden-spirtation (and there's a prize in it for you!)

(Garden-Inspiration in case you were wondering.)

I've lived in this house for four years now and have been meaning to sort my garden out for three and a half of those years. We're quite limited as to what we can do with it really. Most of it is in shade for the whole day, there is only about six foot at the bottom that gets sunshine till about lunchtime due to the shadow cast by four floors of house plus a dorma extension on the roof. Because it's always shaded, it's very damp and we get a lot of weeds and moss growing. The house is over one hundred years old so back in the days of coal burning fires, the poor garden was used as a dumping ground for all of the charred coal for probably seventy years. If we are going to have a decent garden out there, we need to get a little digger in and dig that crap out and replace it with good soil.

This is what we've got at the moment (before shots with out house and after):

We also need to get rid of that giant bush you can see on the right - the bumble bees love it when it's in flower and the birds love it when it's covered in berries in the winter but it's just too big. It fills about half of the garden and the roots go so deep that you can't grow anything else in the bed with it.

These are a few pictures of gardens that make me smile. Gardens I'd love to have at the back of my house.

I love this idea of having little shelved built into the wall. This garden feels quite jungly to me which I like. I think I'd feel protected and hidden away by the big palms. I don't think they'd like my dark garden though.

I like the little stepping stones in this garden. I like the idea of a fairy tale garden. The coloured pencils are fab as well. I can definitely see something like that in my garden! We are thinking of decking the top half of the garden in covering it with lots of pots so this little area would be great in the bit at the bottom that gets the sun.

This is the same garden as above from another angle. I think the teepee is really cool but don't think I'd have one in my own garden. The little wooden toadstools are cute as well. I adore the little mosaic butterflies on the wall, I'm going to have a go at one of those.

This garden is great, there is no space at all but the owner has been really creative in making the most out of the space. LOVE the toilet planter! I saved the old toilet from our out house so that I could make one of these. This photo was taken in Whitby and I love how they have brought in aspects of the sea and fishing by using the rope up the stairs and can you see in the top right, there is a crab cage used as a hanging basket? Love, love, love it!

These are the kind of flowers I'd like to see in my garden. I like the idea of having lots of wild, meadow type flowers like fox gloves, poppies, thistles, lavender, blue bells... 

I'd also like to try and attract butterflies and bumble bees into my garden. My P bought me a butterfly house for my birthday a couple of years ago and it's been sat in the outhouse ever since!

So dear friends, I call on your gardening knowledge to help me! What kind of plants could I use to achieve something like in the pictures above? Do you have a gorgeous garden that you'd like to share? Send me some pics and I'll put them on here. If you have a clever gardening friend or know any green fingered fellow bloggers, send them over to my blog so they can help out too! I'd love to make some new bloggy friends! Send me your ideas. 

I'm thinking there will be a prize for the best idea! I can't really give away a plant, but how about a couple of my lavender filled hanging hearts and a pack of my lavender shoe scents?

I've got someone coming to give us a quote to re-build the wall on Monday so once that is done, we can get started. I'll post work in progress photos as we go along.

P.S For all of you who have been watching from a far and sat shyly in the shadows, please let me know that you're there and leave me a comment so that I can love you right back! To be in with a chance of winning, please add yourself as a follower and mention it in your comment. For a second chance, send a friend or two my way and mention that in your comment!

Thank you for reading and I love you all dearly!

xxx

P.P.S On Friday 11th of June, I will be going to a Landscape Architecture Exhibition at my P's work so what better date to end this giveaway?

Handmade bunting... my favourite thing to do

One of my favourite thing to do (and I have no idea why!) is to hand sew bunting! Metres and metres of the stuff! I love the Country Fete look when it is strewn all over the place. There is something really therapeutic about sitting in front of the telly with lots of squares or triangles and making them into lovely decorations to hang around the house or to decorate a wedding, christening or birthday party.

When I got married, we had a proper traditional English wedding in this church....

With this view....

So I decided that I wanted to have a real village fete style to my reception. 

I wanted lovely wild flowers like lavender, rosemary, hydrangea, freesia, sweet peas, roses. Not in proper arrangements, just simply put in old glass jars and vases and scattered with no pattern all around the room. I did the same with candles in lots of different coloured glass containers. My local charity shop loved me - I absolutely cleaned them out of their glass ware!

I wanted butterflies - on everything! I hand punched butterfly confetti using an old book of love poems, I had little feather butterflies in my bouquet (which I designed myself), butterflies on the invitations (which Paul and I designed, printed and hand tied with pink ribbon ourselves!) in the church, in the flowers, on the buttoneires. I designed my own cake, complete with butterflies! I even got up early on the morning of the wedding to make little butterfly hair grips for my hair!

And to complete the look, I wanted handmade bunting to go around all of the tables. I spent months. Seriously. Months. Hand sewing 100 metres of bunting! But, it was so worth it! The end look was amazing. I was so pleased when I saw the finished hall with all of my hundreds of hours of designing,  sewing, printing, punching, arranging.... the whole thing was beautiful. Because everything was handmade, our wedding hardly cost us anything but we got so many comments about how nice all the decorations were and a lot of people said it was the nicest wedding they'd been to!

More recently, I designed some personalised bunting for my gorgeous little Nephew Charlie for his christening which was on Valentines Day. I decided to go with a heart theme and appliqued a heart to the square on either end and then I did little hanging fabric hearts to hang on the ends. I appliqued his name and zig-zagged all around the edges in lovely red thread. I also bought some little red heart buttons for some extra detail but in the end I thought it looked better without. I got loads of comments on this one at the christening.

I've been thinking about my Etsy store a lot lately, I haven't put anything in it for a long time, I kind of gave up! But I'm thinking (as per the list) that I'll give it a second chance - this time selling stuff I really enjoy making - like my bunting and confetti. I think I will also add a shop page to my blog so people can buy straight from me if they want to. I really love doing the personalised bunting. My friend is getting married this summer (her new name is going to be Lavender - isn't that gorgeous?) so I think I'm going to do one for her in all different shades of lavender and hang some little hand tied lavender bouquets on either end.

So, to get myself back into practice, I was thinking I might do a little giveaway on here! Watch this space for details!