Weather: Grey, warm and drizzly. Lots of midges.
Team: Formal
Today a few of us helped Enrico continue creating his gravel parterres in the Walled Garden. Once the shapes were cut out (Photo 1), we cut out strips of mypex and laid it in the gaps between the turf (Photo 2).
 |
| Photo 1: The cut out shapes completed. |
Me and Alison got the hang of the curves and spirals by pleating the mypex.
 |
| Photo 2: Laying down the mypex. Alison pleating it around one of the circular shapes. |
Once we had laid down the mypex we poured a fine grey gravel on top of it and spread it out as evenly as possible with rakes (Photo 3).
 |
| Photo 3: A fine gravel is laid down once the mypex is laid, as can be seen in the bed closest to the front. |
After we had laid down the finer gravel, we put a bigger white gravel down on top of it. The way they were shaped enabled the bigger white stones to lie quite flat and almost slot into each other. We then stepped on it and rolled it with a manual cylinder roller to really press it in and give it a flat finish (Photo 4). If the white gravel got too dirty, which happened easily in this wet weather, we washed the stones with a hose.
 |
| Photo 4: Enrico & Andy in the background laying down the bigger white gravel and flattening it. Alison and Dan laying down the mypex in the foreground. |
It was a nightmare doing the job when the space was open to the public. Like the former Japanese garden - children are attracted to gravel like a moth to a light. They just can't resist and it was beyond the help of their parents or grandparents too. The children were too quick even for the most attentive, the shapes are so seductive too (they are inspired by children's wooden shaped animal toys), so no sooner had we laid down the gravel the children treated it like a maze and ran straight through it, dispersing the stones all over the place. An inspirational idea for an interactive garden for children perhaps, and a call for a book that looks at the psychology of spaces and materials if there isn't one already - which would be a good read for horticulturists, ethnobotanists and gardeners. But for this purpose, the area should have been cordoned off from the start (eventually it was). It is nice for visitors to see the process but this would not have prevented them from doing so, as they could still view the garden and the work being done underneath the loggia and even from the pathways on the other side.
