Moving house - and garden

Today’s Garden Blogger’s Bloom Day post will be a bit different than all the other I have made before. I am still waiting to hear if I have got the bungalow I have applied for, but it now seems likely that I will get it so I am continuing to prepare for a move. The most important thing I will take with me? My garden of course! Yes, most of my garden is coming with me, at least the plants.

I have been sitting on my gardening stool lifting plants for 2 months and now I am almost done.

I have just 3 more plants to lift and then I will consider myself finished.

I have counted the pots again, every single pot – from the smallest cutting pot to the biggest container.

I got to 624 pots and containers. And they are all coming with me to the new house.

But some plants will stay, because they are too big to move or won’t survive a move. This lovely rose on the fence is one of them, ‘Crimson Cascade’ – it is more than 4m long from one end to the other and it shoots up 2m tall during summer with masses of deep red roses. I will miss it but hope to come back in the autumn to take some cuttings.

These two sarcococcas are staying and so is the Taxus baccata you can just about see in between them. The small rhododendron to the left is one of two plants I hope to come back for in November and the new tenant has agreed to this.

The Grand Lady of the garden, the huge camellia sadly has to stay. I would have needed a digger to move it!

I have tried several times to take cuttings from it, but have failed. The branches are not low enough for me to bury and root so I can’t see any other way of propagating it.

I inherited the camellia with the house and have no idea of name or age, it is probably as old as the gardens around here, which means it is at least 60 years old.

The huge hydrangea I planted 12 years ago as a tiny plant is also staying, so is the Viburnum next to it.

I have tried to leave plants with no or minimal requirements, the rose being the only exception, as the new tenant is no gardener and wants to leave his current house because he can’t take care of the garden there. In my garden here he will have shrubs with all year interest and a few plants that need a bit of care, but not exactly overwhelming work. The hard landscaping is staying so he could always put in some more plants when he feels more confident.

I was a bit afraid of stripping the garden completely bare, but when I made a list of everything I have left here, I think it looks quite long after all – it just shows how many plants I had to start with I guess. So after taking out 649 pots, the plants I am leaving are:

Anemone white

Arisaema amurense (those I could not find, probably many)

Arisarum  proboscideum, Mouse Plant (those I could not find, probably many)

Camellia japonica

Clematis 'Ville de Lyon' 

Clematis texensis 'Gravetye Beauty' 

Convallaria majalis, Lily of the Valley (lots)

Crocus (those I could not find, probably many)

Cyclamen (those I could not find, mainly babies which will grow bigger over the years)

Disporopsis pernyi (3 plants)

Fern

Galanthus nivalis (a few, will self-seed over the years)

Galanthus woronowii (a few, will self-seed over the years)

Helleborus hybridus (lots of babies, will become mature plants in 5 years’ time)

Hemerocallis 'Sammy Russell'

Hydrangea macrophylla 'Dark Pink'

Hydrangea macrophylla 'Pink' 

Lilium 'Orange Joy' (6 bulbs)

Lilium regale (not sure how many I have left, probably around 30 + of various size)

Narcissus, unknow - white and yellow (around 20)

Ophiopogon planiscapus 'Nigrescens' (2 plants and many offspring)

Paeonia lactiflora 'Sarah Bernhardt'

Penstemon Pensham 'Amelia Jayne'

Puschkinia Libanotica (those I could not find)

Rhododendron 'Dopey'

Rhododendron 'Geisha Purple' (Azalea)

Rosa 'Crimson Cascade'

Sarcococca confusa

Sarcococca hookeriana var. digyna

Scilla Siberica 'Bright Blue' (those I could not find)

Skimmia japonica 'Rubella' (2 plants)

Syringa komarowii reflexa (?)

Taxus baccata 'Fastigiata Robusta'

Thuja (plicata?) (the 9-10m tall tree – definitely not something to move!)

Viburnum 'Farreri'

I hope this will be a manageable garden for the new tenant and I have offered to come and help and give advice if he wants it – that gives me a chance to take some cuttings too.

Having lifted and potted all the plants I started to think about how to move all these pots over to the new garden. After several days’ search on the Internet I came across a company that buy, sell and hire new and used plastic boxes and crates of all sizes. The company, Plastic Box Sales has given me an amazing service and I am so happy I managed to find them online. The owner David has really gone above and beyond normal customer service and I like to give credit where credit is due!

The crates I chose are the same as those supermarkets use when you have home delivery, and last week I got 100 crates delivered to my front garden. 170 kg of crates placed in my front garden – and I had bin collection day the next day....

I spent 4 hours carrying, pushing, pulling and dragging crates, 3 at the time, from my front garden, through my house to the back and stacking them up here in the garden, ready to be filled with plants.

And this is my garden yesterday, from a distance it looks no different than usual.

But it is. All the plants are now tucked into crates and the crates are placed in the beds between the few plants still left there.

There are crates everywhere, the garden looks like a garden centre on stocktaking day.

More crates.

And on this side too.

There are even crates on my garden bench as I could not fit all of them in the beds. The crates are perfect for my various sizes of pots, even filled with large pots the crates are still a manageable weight to lift and carry. Some of the crates can be stacked on top of each other during transportation, the rest of the crates will have to be transported unstacked as the plants are too tall.

And look at my nursery shelf – it has been crammed full of plants from day one, now all that’s left are the containers on the top.

The largest pots and containers are here on the patio, no point in putting them in a crate as they are easier to carry one by one.

My aim is to get a removal company to move everything, but I need a quote for the job first so I will ask the company I have chosen to come and look first – once I have a moving date. I hope they won’t faint when they see what I got in my garden!!! If the quote for moving both house content and garden is too expensive for me, the alternative is for my son to hire a van and then ask a few people around to help moving the plants. It has to be done as close as possible to my moving day as I can’t leave the plants in the new garden for too long before I am living there myself – plants in pots have to be watered much more often than when in the ground and with the good weather we are having now I have been watering thoroughly 2 times a week.

I still have 3 plants to dig up, 2 large fuchsias here on the end, and the enormous Clematis armandii 'Apple Blossom' – currently in full flower. I would not leave such a monster plant to someone who has declared himself a non-gardener, it requires a LOT of pruning to keep in shape on this wall so I would not wish to leave such a high-maintenance plant. My aim is to simply chop it off at the height of the fence and lift it out. Hopefully it won’t be a huge job as it has only been 2 years in the ground.

I assume the clematis will regrow quickly as this plant grows with the speed of light! It deserves a space where it can grow bigger and spread more than what I gave it here, I hope it will get that in my new garden. If I can’t get it to recover at least I will have tried – and saved the new tenant from a big headache plant :-)

My biggest plant to move didn’t need to be lifted, it was already in a container – my lovely Magnolia soulangeana 'Heaven Scent'. It is now well over 3m tall but is slim and should not be a problem getting through the house if carried by two people.

The magnolia has been flowering for a few weeks and these photos are from last weekend, before the petals started dropping in the strong wind we had yesterday.

The magnolia will get a permanent place in the new garden in the ground, I think it will like that better than life in a container, but it seems happy enough for now growing in a container.

I just love these huge flowers, sadly they have no scent, which is strange considering the name 'Heaven Scent'.

I still don’t know when I will be moving – in fact – I haven’t signed a contract yet so I am not even 100% sure IF I am moving, but I am not able to pack up my house - and my garden in one week, and that’s all I get from signing the contract till I am expected to move – that’s social housing in Britain for you. Instead I have to do a little bit of work every day and just hope I am going to move. Packing up the house is going to take me a good few weeks to complete now that I am almost finished with the garden. I hope to have some good news for you all when I write my next post at the end of the month. Until then, take care.

I am linking my post to Carol at May Dreams Gardens, please visit our host for many more April gardens.


UPDATE – FROM MY HOSPITAL BED !!

Wednesday I had an outpatient appointment at the pain clinic at UCLH, here in London, and after I was finished, while waiting for hospital transport to go home, I went to the toilet. I did what I needed, put my clothes back on, and noticed my compression tights on the left foot was not straight. I bent down to straighten it – and dislocated my hip, standing there in the toilet at the hospital!
I am now lying in a hospital bed, not sure what’s going to happen with everything. My hip is back in place, I had a general anaesthetic last night where they put it back in place, but they have not let me out of bed yet and I am unsure if I will have to eventually change my hip replacement to a bigger and more stable one, as this is the second time I am dislocating.

This could not have come at a worse time, with a house and garden half packed and a house move pending. After a dislocation I will have 8-10 weeks were I will not be allowed to bend forward more than 90 degrees when standing and sitting, and not pick up anything from the ground. Apart from that is obviously the pain, I don’t respond to normal pain medication so there is not really anything I can take to relieve pain at home, and what I get in hospital is not much help either. How is that for bad luck? I have been sooooo careful since my last dislocation in August 2012, I really have been taking care for it not to happen again. And then I manage to dislocate my hip replacement in a hospital. You would think that would make things easier, when things like that happen in a hospital, but it still took nearly 12 hours before I was in theatre having my hip put back in place.

I hope I will be sent home soon, and if I have to have yet another hip operation hopefully it can come later on, when I have time to deal with it and everything that comes afterwards in terms of recovery. Right now I need to get fit enough to move house!

I am sorry I won’t be able to respond to you all individually, but I will get back to you all later on. More updates when I have some news :-)