National Gardening Week | Love My Garden Party

So, with National Gardening Week fast approaching, and the weather just about summering up, I'm getting a wee bit excited to get outside. So it's all rather serendipedy that NGW runs from Monday 15th April to Sunday the 21st... i.e. In a week's time!

This happens to be the weekend that we have some very dear friends coming to stay, so I won't be out gardening, so I guess my way of celebrating National Gardening Week will hopefully be the same way we celebrated the Diamond Jubilee last summer: nice food, cold drinks, colourful bunting and lovely company. (Here's to holding out hope for BBQ weather). So I've decided to host a 'Love my Garden' party (weather permitting!)

Over the years I have built up a rather splendid collection of various summer garden bits 'n' bobs, and have waited a very long time to use them since last summer! P also bought me a whole load of alfresco dining related things for my birthday in March, and I was even given a lovely little chimnea too, so you can see how much I want to be outside... There are birthday toys that I haven't been able to play with yet!

So, we will plan to have the Love my Garden Party next weekend, but I'll do a post about that nearer the time. I guess, in view of NGW coming up, I will do a little before and after post about our garden for now, after the work we did on it last year.

The original state that we had to work with was this:

(Please excuse the photo dates - these were images I had ready for a post rather a while ago)

Despite this looking rather a mess, it was actually a lot worse two years ago. Neither of us knew there was a garden there, it was so overgrown! There's a pond there just to the left of that tree, where the dried up reeds are. It was full of fallen cooking apples that had gone rotten and polluted the water. And other than the grass (and weeds), there wasn't a massive amount growing.

After months of hard work (we worked on it from March to July 2012), the garden at No. 11 was now in a state that we were finally happy to invite people round, and what better time to get it finished by than the Diamond Jubilee weekend? It all timed out quite nicely.

I'm so in love with hydrangeas.

But of course, after our fartoolong-winter, our pretty little garden isn't looking too fly now. So it's back to work (I can't believe we were working on it last March - I've barely wanted to leave the house this spring!) and I'm now equipped with birthday plants (roses, clematis, dahlias) and fresh ideas to get back out there and get it back to how it should be.

So I say a spring-fresh hello! to National Gardening Week, and can't wait to get my gardening gloves on, perhaps even with my sunglasses.

Have you got any plans for your garden next week? Or are you celebrating anything, perhaps outside?


Thanks for visiting,