Hard Landscaping in the Front Bed - Six on Saturday

Back in 2017, our neighbours gave us the outer ring sector stones from a brand new 2.7 metre (9') diameter paving circle - they'd only laid the two inner rings themselves in their back garden.  

I spotted the pieces being loaded into the boot of their car and asked what they intended to do with them, and they were actually going to take them to the tip !   These are cut from stone, not mould-formed in concrete, so I bet the full circle kit was very expensive and, of course, it being the outer ring they were discarding, they were throwing away around three-quarters of the weight of all the stone they'd paid for ...

Anyway, we managed to rescue them, and for the last couple of years these 24 sectors have formed a winding path across the length of the side bed (see also the satellite image on our garden layout post).

As with almost all our paving, the stones were simply laid loose onto levelled and compacted soil - no hardcore foundations or mortar bed fixings - because it's not the first time we've decided to relocate sections of paving.

the long and winding road, to the left...

And last week, we decided to move all these paving stones to the front bed and reconfigure them to their intended purpose, i.e. as a ring.  

The shape of the front bed is not particularly interesting, being bordered on all sides by straight lines ... 

the front bed before the works ....

... so we laid out half of the ring to get an idea of what it would look like, and then decided to proceed with stripping away some turf and extending the bed to accommodate the full circle.  At this stage we hadn't even harvested the remaining beetroots !

So using a spade tied to a piece of string from a fence pin at the centre of the circle, I marked out the turf at the ring radius plus 500 mm, to create an annular border.

marking out the turf cut ...

The existing square paviors were lifted, and then the turf was stripped and barrowed around to the compost bins.   

The three square full paving slabs were re-laid further north to abut against the existing pathway parallel to the front fence, and one of the diagonal-cut halves was positioned to make a run-out for the border edging.   More turf was removed to sink these slabs so their surfaces were level with the lawn.

The remaining pieces of the stone circle were laid out roughly, just to check that everything was OK.

The soil at the circumference of the lawn was dug away locally using a trowel, to create a seat for the edging.  This curved length of lawn was edged using bricks.  I use bricks or paving slabs for all our lawn edgings, so that when I cut the grass I can get the cut right up to the edges by simply running the petrol-mower wheels along the top.

The ring sectors were then all lifted again, and the soil underneath compacted first by treading and then using a heavy steel plate welded to a pipe, which I use as a wacker.   I spread a few bags of sharp sand around and levelled it up as best as I could using the back of a rake.

brick edging of the border, and sharp sand for bedding the ring ...

And finally, the stone ring sectors were re-laid onto the bedding sand.

just about finished for now ...

view from the bedroom window - that old
bench needs cutting up for firewood ...

I'll leave them for a few weeks to settle down, and then I'll probably need to go around with a bucket of sand and re-level a few individual stones.

Behind the big shed, I've the centre sections from one of the smaller stone rings we laid in the side lawn back in 2015 - we removed these inner pieces to plant our Olearia macrodonta shrub.  

We'll likely lay these two semi-circular stones in the middle of our new ring and place either a large pot or statue on them, as a centrepiece.

But that can all wait for another day ...

Check out this week's other Six-on-Saturday gardening posts over at The Propagator's blog.