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Planting Bed #3 was originally unplanned, and resulted from the realisation that one of the others couldn’t be as large as originally planned. It’s not that we were going to be short of planting beds. I mean, I’m going to have to buy enough soil to build a 1/2 scale model of Maiden Castle so that I can fill all these beds, but I have to admit that adding this one gives a certain symmetry to the chimney. Anyway, it’s a long span of bare wall that has been a long span of bare wall for 20 years. Breaking that up a little bit felt like a good idea.
In engineering terms, this was also the area of wall that suffered the worst from the bad slope on the old patio. It got very wet every time there was any rain. So I decided it might be better to put a bed in as part of the big plan.
You can see from the photos that at the time of writing, in late September 2020, the bed has all the brickwork done but doesn’t have coping and doesn’t contain any plants. That time will come. In fact, it already passed. Check out the completed Planting Bed #3 in the gallery.
As with a couple of the other beds, we also have no idea what the planting scheme will be in this one. I fancy either one that contains alpines or one that contains desert plants. Both like very dry soil, so maybe I’ll put both together. There must be a high alpine desert somewhere. What grows there? Although in Milton Keynes they’ll have to be high-alpine desert plants that can cope with a bit of rain.
Fast forward to March. I bought a load of topsoil and filed up all four of the beds round the side. By this stage we’d decided the bed was Izzy’s. It’s in full sun so she’d researched and chosen a few things.
We drove over to our local branch of Frosts Garden Centre to see what we could find. Apparently it was a bit early for summer-flowering things, so we just got some of the earlier varieties and vowed to return a couple of weeks later. I guess that by Easter weekend they’ll has restocked. In the meantime, we’ll leave it with the Choiysa, Hebe and Dianthus.