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It’s a sign that your kids are growing up when one of them asks if I can build her a planting bed. It wasn’t just random. That would be weird. “Dad, can I have a planting bed?” No, I started on the great garden rework in spring and Ami asked if she could have a raised bed. She wanted to design and plant it up herself. So planting bed #1 has always been known as Ami’s Bed.
The plan was, as for all of these beds, to lay a concrete base first. On top of this are bricks to an appropriate height, topped off with coping stones. That is, pretty much, the most frequently used method for building planting beds in the garden.
Planting Bed #1, along with two of the others, is quite close to the house. I needed to build walls with enough gap to stop any chance of water creeping above the house’s damp proof. As a result it’s a full 4-wall construction.
This particular one is limited in height because of an overflow pipe coming out of the side of the house that I didn’t want to move. If any water does happen to flow out from the toilet cistern it will land in the planting bed.
I had no idea what Ami was intending to plant in the bed at the time of initially writing this post, but in the picture gallery you can see where she went. There are three low-growing leafy shrubs at the back, a cluster of little “fluffy” things that I suspect will grow into flowing plants in the spring. Then there’s a sedum and a horizontal juniper in the front corners. Nice job.