The year 1998 in my garden

I have tried to translate the danish page Haven to english. I think you may understand it, but I know, there must be lots of mistakes in it, and if anybody would help me to do it a little better and send me an e-mail, I should be very happy.

My garden has been very much neglected for a couple of years. My husband Hans and I took care of it together and the garden have had to do without not only him - also me because of he's health and death in 1997. We also had a vedgetablegarden outside the city where we live There we grew vegetables, berries and fruit. The last year of he's life he couldn't do anything but watch and it was very difficult for him. After he passed away I sold the vegetablegarden and I've been able to use all my energy in the garden around my house. Here I have rearranged things to make it easy to manage.

Already about newyear I found these juleroser (Helleborus niger) outside my kitchenwindow.

Behind the house to the south there is a small private yard, where one can be completely unseen from neighbors and people outside the house. Here you can take a sunbathe, and there is a summer-room where nobody except ourselves can know what we have put on the table to eat. Here I dug a hole for a small pond for goldfish. The problem keeping the water free from seaweed was solved by letting a pump led the water to a small waterfall into a basket with peat and some small stones.

In the yard there also is a barbecueplace made from tiles and an a roast from an old kitchenware. This barbecue has been outside the house summer aswell as winter for 16 years without getting rusty like the iron-ones we can buy usually do, it they are not taken inside.

Here is a nice place to sty also in the evenings. Unfortunately we didn't have any hot summernights in Denmark this year, where we could stay outside without dressing almost like in wintertime..

If you go with me down some stairs we can se the strawberryplants (from the vegetablegarden) and a wineplant. The grapes never get ripe. This plant should have been situated in a greenhouse. It's to cold here to profit from the grapes. But sometimes I have used the leaves to make the Greek dish DOLMADES..

There is a leveldiffrence on my ground about 6 m. Therefore the stairs and we have often dreamed about making a small brook with waterfalls and so on, but it was always only a dream.. Now we reach the westside of the house. Here some tiles are used for a stair for flowers.

Here you see my next diggingproject. It was much to hard for me to transport the gardentools and garbage up and down some high stairs. Therefore I took up the tiles and put some small cementstones between so the stairs were lower. Now its much better.

From the stairs we simply must listen to the birds. Here you se one of my 3 small "apartments" I have 3 small birdfamelies living near me. In front of the house outside my kitchenwindow there is a bird feeder, so "we eat together".... From here we can also se my lawn and the next project this year: MOS! I moved away 14 big bags of MOS from the lawn, put on it some new seed on the bare spots .. and now some months later it's Nice green again.

Now we are in the lower part of the garden, and we can se the springflowers under the trees. Here you see forsythia, kærmindesøster (brunnera macrophylla), tulips, daffodils and many more kinds of flowers.

In Denmark we make christmasdecorations for Christmas. You might use a swamp from the woods put some clay on it to fasten a big candlelight and then decorate with all kind of things. We have candlelight on the diningtable and all over the place at christmas.They can look like these

Well ! This swamp was througn down in the garden a couple of years ago, and look what happened to the rest of an old tree, that was cut down. Do you think the swamp have reproduced itself here ?

Here are some flowers blooming later in the summer

The summer is passing now, and it's so nice to have some good help. Here are my 3 grandchildren helping me to put some new onions down for tulips for next year. Ejner is putting down the yellow ones, Konrad the red ones and Frida is helping them. They now know exactly where the yellow and where the red ones will come and the are already waiting impatiently to see if their grandma told the truth. about the tulips.

Before there was no Gras along the hedge, where Hans used to pull up weeds all the time. Now I have rearranged it, so I don't need to do that anymore. It's moved, when the lawn is. Oh. you should have known how much weed I took away this year. Imagine this has not been done for some years. Almost all the plants have ben dug up and planted again after the soil has been cleaned for roots. Next year I hope everything is going to be much eazyer.

Now it's getting colder and colder here. I just heard in the nows, we are going to have only 3 degrees Celsius this night. I cannot belive it.. But October has started and when the leaves start getting the yellow color we know that it's autumn.

I'll not promise more pictures from the garden this year.. only... perhaps... if we get some snow.. we'll se........