Sue's Folly

Another freezing night with frost this morning so no cycle ride out today.  Instead I wrapped up warm and went outside to do some work on ‘Sue’s folly’.  My folly is a pile of rubble that I am gradually transforming into a rockery.  The previous owners of our property knocked down the stone piggery to make a useful terrace.  They dumped all the rubble and stone in a huge pile in the garden that quickly became covered in nettle and bramble.  It resembled a massive bramble bush. 

The sensible solution would have been to pay someone to remove the rock and rubble and just re-turf the area for easy mowing.  Paul had other ideas.  He wanted a rockery.  Unfortunately it’s not just a matter of re-arranging a few rocks and chucking some seeds down.  I’m not a gardener, whilst I enjoy designing stuff and harvesting fruit and veg from the potager I’m not keen on pulling weeds.  But the pile of rubble trying to be a rockery began to annoy me.  So over the years I have worked on little areas of the pile and it has gradually turned into a bona fide rockery. 

I have only ever bought two plants for it, everything else has been ‘borrowed’ from other areas of the garden.  One was the Ice Plant, which is a succulent perennial that spreads like wildfire and gives up vivid pink flowers all summer.  (Apparently it is called an ice plant because the flowers and leaves seem to shimmer as though covered in frost or ice crystals.)

The other was a single pot of Sempervivum.  This is an alpine succulent with a spikey, rosette appearance that propagates by sending out offshoots or babies. I just gather the babies and move them to other areas of the rockery.   Both plants thrive on neglect so are very well suited to my style of gardening.