Stumpery Part 2

26th June 2023

Hopefully not sounding too weird, but I have this 'thing' where it seems like the garden tells me what to do - what features to create, what plants to put and where and so on. Well, the other day when I was building the stumpery, I 'saw' a statue of a Grecian woman with a water pot, standing behind the stumpery on the left hand side, with a tree fern behind her. Obviously, it was just the light through the trees, but it did seem like a good idea.

So I looked up tree ferns online with a view to buying one. But good grief!! What a price! Hundreds of £££, or else a tiny one with no stump at all, yet still costing quite a lot. And they only grow about an inch a year! So that's not going to happen, I thought.

Then yesterday, I visited a plant nursery I hadn't been to before and they had tree ferns with stumps - small-ish, but still a stump (about 4-6") - for a very reasonable amount (LOTS less than the £100s I had seen online; in fact about one tenth the price).

Then I also found a statue exactly like I had imagined. So, this morning, I removed an acer that wasn't very happy where it was and put it in a pot. Then cleared the weeds and periwinkle, and dug over the soil. The fern is still in its pot and is likely to remain in a pot, though probably one a bit more decorative than grey plastic! And 'Phoebe' is standing happily in front of it.

In front

Behind

From the side

This was the state of play on June 26th. Update today, July 9th, Phoebe is now standing on a small slab to give her extra stability and will be mortared in place when I do a job requiring mortar. The tree fern has been transferred to a lovely clay pot I happened to have lying around the garden. And I have planted some spreading. low-growing campanula plants around Phoebe's base, with a primrose of two to finish off the corner.

Phoebe on her paving slab with the campanula planted around her

The random pot I had lurking in the garden

Both together and all done bar the mortaring

NOTE: If you read yesterday's post, you will have seen I have managed to lose some photos. I now think I know what happened to them, but whether or not they are recoverable remains to be seen.