Yet another Epimedium project to report on, I’m afraid. Wishing to make as good a National Collection as possible and and having acquired a considerable number of new Epimediums, we have been looking for more suitable areas to plant them out, within our limited space.
Once again, the aquatic side of our garden has taken a hit.
There were three concrete raised ponds arranged so that pumped water would over flow from the highest to the lowest.These were built nearly forty years ago and all were leaking, to the point that major repairs would be needed for them to function properly again, as ponds. Also over those years they have become rather shaded by surrounding Magnolias, for aquatic plants to give of their best.
Therefore back in mid September, we started the not inconsiderable task of converting the highest of the three ponds into a raised bed for Epimediums and other shade tolerant plants.
The first job was to pump out the water and to remove the aquatic plants. There were a couple of Peltandra plants which we moved to a new home, but a car full of mostly Iris pseudacorus var.bastardii went to be recycled at our local rubbish tip.
There were three brick built waterlily boxes and a brick retaining wall holding back coarse gravel in an ‘under-gravel’ filter. The soil from the lily boxes was bagged up for later use as was the gravel. The brick boxes and wall were then broken up with a sledge hammer.
I have been hankering for a concrete breaker for years to be told by the better half, I didn’t have enough possible future use to justify buying one. In a fantastic piece of syncronicity or fate, on the day I needed to start breaking up the bottom of the pond, Screwfix sent me an E-mail where their budget concrete breaker was £20.00 off, as a deal of the day. I was permitted to buy this impressive tool, and wasn’t I glad I did? I had forgotten that I had built the pond to hopefully see me out.
The bottom was about 6 inches thick of good concrete, reinforced with chicken wire. The chicken wire would have made it nigh on impossible for an old man with a sledgehammer to break it up. As it was, it took quite a few sessions to puncture through the majority of the concrete bottom with the breaker. The broken bricks were spread over the broken concrete, plus other hardcore from around the garden and donated by our friendly builder.
Over this went the filter gravel, some odd bags of dirty pea shingle and old aquarium gravel. We also had two sacks of old nylon pot scourers which had formed a ‘state of the art’ koi filter in the 1980s which went in the hole to help fill the void. The lily box muddy earth went over this.
Eighteen months earlier our next door neighbour got us to remove his small front lawn, as it was constantly being dug up by badgers. When we did this we found a lot of cockchaffer grubs which were obviously the cause of the badger activity.
About a cubic yard of the turf and soil which had been in plastic bags for well over a year was used next in the pond. Much to our surprise, there were cockchafer grubs still alive in the long dead turf. With all the above materials in the hole, there was still about 20 inches of soil and growing medium needed, to fill the remainder of the bed. At the end of the day it took 5 ton bags of soil, 20 builders’ bags of sharp sand, 6 x 150 litre bails of peat and 6 x 75 litre bags of multipurpose compost, to complete the job.
Three Japanese Maples have now been planted for structure and about thirty Epimediums plus a few Roscoeas, snowdrops and Cyclamen, to give a longer season of interest. A dozen or so of the Epimediums are new French hybrids from Thierry Dellabroye.We are waiting with a good deal of anticipation to hopefully see many of them flower for the first time for us.
When we are feeling strong again, we may start changing the other two ponds into raised woodland beds. Fortunately from the work and back filling point of view, the two together are probably smaller than the one we have completed.
