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Kas wanted a tallish bed in the corner between the garage and the house. She wanted it right where I’d put a new bit of fence). She wanted a tall bed to help hide my beautiful new bit of fence. Officially, she wanted tall grasses and similarly vertical plants to help create a screen wall. Cheeky wanting to hide my fence, but garage wall is dull. Anyway, I duly painted some lines onto the old patio for the purposes of visualisation. The lines are the plan. And if it’s on the plan, I’ll do it.
I laid the base for this one quite early, as I was doing some other work in that corner. The interesting feature (if you can call it that) for this bed is that the corner is not a right angle. It’s slightly acute. And, indeed, the fence is not strictly in alignment with the wall of the house either, so the back of the bed is somewhat off-square. I wanted the front of it to be square though, to make it look nice when the slabs go down. This was therefore the most difficult bed to lay the bricks for.
Thankfully though, it’s not structural, and if it falls down it’ll make a mess on the patio but won’t really hurt anything.
I started with a nice deep mortar bed as Kas had asked for the bed to be roughly her waist height. It’s the tallest of the beds I built, so I didn’t want to skimp on the footing.
I built the wall in several stages. Essentially, I added a couple of courses whenever the urge took me. It was nearly November before it was high enough. The bricks are sufficiently rough and irregularly shaped that the non-right angles don’t look bad. It was all right-angles on the front anyway, so that worked out nicely. You might even think I planned it that way. The finished effect is good. I just need to add some plants.
Anyway, I’m looking forward to finishing this one off with some coping stones and planting it up. I sort of fancy the idea of some architectural plants in that corner too. It always was a bit of a big and boring wall.