Cotoneaster Lacteus Hedge Training

To form our parallel evergreen hedge, we planted the cell-grown saplings at the start of June 2017, so this is now their third summer in the garden.

the saplings after planting in summer 2017 ...

... and in early summer 2018

For the first couple of years, we'd basically just left them to become well established, resisting the temptation to trim or thin them in any significant way. 

Left to its own devices, Cotoneaster Lacteus is of spreading & arching habit and hence very slow in gaining significant height, so by this April there was a dense tangle of low growth and it was time to start training some of it upwards to form the high hedge we want. 

Making a Garden Water Feature - Cascade

Hot on the heels of our waterwheel, we've now built another water feature to sit under the Cypress tree in the south-east corner of the rear garden.

This was an unusual project for me, in that there were no plans drawn up or even preliminary sketches - I had the idea for it one evening, made a start immediately and then everything was just built on the fly over the next few days.

We had five large stepping stones in the front garden bed, of irregular shapes, which I lifted and then hauled them around to the back.  I laid them out in a rough curve around and between some existing plants, overlapping the ends of the stones to establish the required start and finish points of the cascade.

I had some lengths of 2"x2" timber behind the shed, reclaimed from the old rabbit enclosures, and I used these plus other timber offcuts to make a simple carcass with five levels to carry the stepping stones.  I made the first drop much larger than the subsequent ones, to form a waterfall which pours onto the second stone down.   Each stone feeds the one below.  The fifth and lowest stone overflows directly into an underground sump from where it is recirculated back to the top using a pump.

The carcass tower was framed with offcuts of fence boards from our front fence build last year.  

carcass during construction