The garden is ours

Some years ago, long before we bought our present house, the owners decided that it would be nice to create a level space at the rear of the house, an area of decking, where they could.... well we don't actually know what it was for. Perhaps they put chairs there so they could sit and enjoy the view of the hill rising up beyond the rear garden fence. Given that the sun only shines fully on that side of the house later in the day and that we have a healthy midge population who come out when the wind drops then perhaps this is wrong. Maybe it was somewhere to sit in the shade on hot days when the breeze was too much for the midges to cope with. We can only speculate. Whatever it was for, by the time we invested our money in acquiring the property the wooden decking was in poor shape. The surrounding guard rail was rotting and threatening to collapse and the decking itself was crumbling to bits in various places. So we removed it as described some months ago here and this is what happened next.

The world beneath the decking was exposed to daylight for many months. It consisted in the main of large pieces of concrete, some slabs which once formed the walls of a long ago dismantled concrete coal bunker together with broken pieces of rubble from some other long lost structure. Despite this it did not take long before weeds began to establish themselves on whatever soil was present and this gave the area a novel green and grey look. We stumbled across this uneven patch of ground on a regular basis as we moved around the back of the house until eventually we convinced ourselves that we should employ the services of a professional to create a decent surface for us to walk on, something to our own taste and not those of previous owners.

It was heavy physical work, not made easy because all the materials had to be carried up to the house from road level where they had been unloaded on delivery. The project took five days to complete and our professional landscape contractor was fortunate in that during this period not a single drop of rain fell from the sky. This would have delayed the work since apart from breaking up many of the concrete bits to create an even surface new concrete was needed to secure the new sandstone pavers as they were laid. It was important that these slabs were laid on a slight slope so that rainwater could not pool there and although the cutting to shape of each paver produced immense clouds of dust, once this dissipated it revealed the patterned finish we wanted.

The end result (we have gone nautical and named it the 'Poop Deck') is pleasing to the eye and solid to walk on, far better than the rotten decking that was there before. Our plans had also included removal of an awkward flight of steps, something we had never seen the point of, so the whole area appears somewhat less cluttered than before.

It was some days after the work was finished before we felt comfortable walking on it (the concrete and the grouting between the slabs needed time to 'go off') and in any case the week long dry spell was followed immediately by days of rain and wind which did little to tempt us outside. What did gradually begin to dawn on us, however, was that in the space of a week we had changed the view from the house. When the decking was there the wooden guard rail around it had partly obscured our view of the garden, something we took for granted until it was gone. Even then the mess exposed by removing the decking had still tainted our view of the garden, a place where we have planted things, like trees. We have built a few raised beds but we have deliberately left areas untouched to allow wild things like mosses and heather to proliferate. We have trodden pathways which criss-cross the garden so we can walk around without fighting the long grass and all this we have done ourselves, transforming the whole area into something we enjoy. Now suddenly we can see the whole thing at a glance simply by standing at a window inside our house.

Or alternatively we can view the garden from the top of our shed roof through the lens of a camera fixed up there. Despite all the wind and rain this thing keeps working and with its WiFi connection to the house we can see what it sees. It will start recording if it senses movement, which means that we will know if the odd deer wanders around but there are flaws to this feature. At night its infra-red night vision detects spiders who inhabit odd corners of the shed roof and seem to enjoy crawling across the camera lens.  This can give us rather scary close ups of their night time activity.

And then there is this chap. This is who the garden really belongs to, or so he thinks. He is attracted by the bird feeder placed just beneath him although he finds this something of a challenge due to the modifications we have made to discourage larger birds from feeding there. For a gull it is all a question of being able to balance whilst reaching down and grabbing morsels of bird food and he has to keep flapping his wings in order to do this. For this one particular bird, who we have named Jonathan, the effort seems to be worthwhile and in some ways we admire him for his persistence.

But he is not alone. This is a hooded crow, native to our part of Scotland and known here as a 'hoodie'. These are highly intelligent birds but he knows that trying to access the bird feeder is not safe for him; it could lead to injury as there are sticks and cords fixed above it designed so that only small birds can access it. But he also knows that beneath every feeder is spillage, seeds that are dropped onto the ground, and he will spend ages searching for these.