Newbie looking for suggestions for a yard garden

[TKR99]

Hi guys
Hoping someone can maybe provide me with some ideas on how to better landscape my tiny & I mean TINY yard garden.   I live in East Belfast in a mid-terrace house which has an L-shaped yard - with the long arm of the L from back door to back gate being roughly about 13' or so, and the short arm (which is a wall) being about 10-12' roughly I think and 3' in width.  And that width is halved in the long part of the L by a redundant boiler house that takes up at least 1/2 of it and is 4' in length situated about 1/2 way along it.

I really only started getting into any sort of gardening about 4 years ago, as I'm disabled (raft of rheumatic conditions), and can't easily cope with pots and tubs, but determined I was going to get some colour into this drab area, so unfortunately since then have gone somewhat overboard.   I now have it absolutely utterly bunged from one end to the other with more plants than I can probably manage properly, but SO enjoying the excitement of seeing them grow and develop, especially when I can't remember what I planted  .  However, the problem has arisen more this year than previous, where I've discovered some of my plants aren't the small shrubs I'd hoped they might be if kept in tubs, but are rather growing into TREES!!  I've already had to give 1 away and can see another 2 likely to go too (Viburnum and a Mock Orange).  I've currently got something like 20+ tubs and pots with everything from dahlias and a bonsai, through Japanese maples (4!) and roses (both mini & standard), to rhododendron, lilac and camellia, so think it's perhaps time I looked for a bit of input to what better way I could "landscape" the area.   I'm seriously debating if I can somehow raise the funds, in getting the entire yard paved in a year or two, as it's just got a concrete surface currently which is getting rather slippy and hard to keep clean.  I'm going to rip out the old boiler house and put in a proper little shed around the back of the kitchen instead, as my aim is to have it so I could at least perhaps sit out for the first couple of hours of the day when it gets the sun.  It literally gets the sun from 9-2 so I try to rotate plants around for best light.  But it's very enclosed otherwise and no way of improving on that.

What I'm really looking to find out is whether anyone knows how I could get some on-site advice perhaps of how best to organise it if/when I do get the work done?  At the moment I have the next best thing to a raised bed where the old oil tank once sat (2 rows of breeze blocks) where I now put the smaller tubs so I can better manage them.   But I'm wondering whether I would be best to cut back on the volume, and given I love shrubs, colour and scent, what ones would be most suitable to consider.

I didn't want to put loads of pics up here but this one shows the yard space from kitchen to gate pretty much:



Any suggestions appreciated 

[ideasguy]

Hi Romayne
You've found your way around the forum very quickly -well done

You have risen to the challenge extremely well so far. One very good thing Ive noted is that you get sunlight into your back from 9am  to 2 pm.

If you wish to keep to shrubs then I have one suggestion - train them by regular pruning and tying/wiring in bonsai fashion so they grow tight to the wall with little outward growth. The Viburnum and Mock Orange and other shrubs may well respond to that treatment and the scented ones should provide fragrance down your pathway.

Clematis may be a good choice as they are vertical growers but you would need to choose the less rampant varieties.

I'm sure our members will have comments to add

[TKR99]

Thanks for the welcome.   Well used to this type of forum as I run the same one for my charity "Fibromyalgia Support" and have had plenty of fun breaking it and fixing it again plus playing around with multiple options, but a nice change to be a regular visitor rather than a manager on one.

Appreciate the suggestions - I had wondered how those types of larger plants would respond to being kept in very small pots, but it seems that the likes of the Mock Orange (Philadelphus?) in particular wont flower if it's not given its head in a sense.   I also have a "Smoke tree" which is going to have to be pruned again this year anyway as it's really getting badly out of shape, but I'll have to figure out how to do it properly so as to get more flowers on it too if I can.   I'm a bit frustrated with the rhododendron and camellia as I've seen them in the garden centre (Hillmount) in similar sized pots to mine yet theirs are in full flower - mine just keep on putting out green shoots in all directions and I'm scared to prune in case I again stop them flowering the next year perhaps.  They're both at least 3-4 years old I would think. 

I've also got a honeysuckle out the front of house which I'm trying to train up the wall there, but my last experience with one wasn't the best - it didn't flower until the 3rd year, by which time it had gone so far up the house you couldn't even smell the flowers and the lower growth had pretty much all died off.  I'm pruning this one like mad just now in the hope I can persuade it to flower a bit lower down at least - be an interesting experiment too.   

But I'm certainly hopeful that the concept of keeping these larger shrubs come trees in small pots will keep them a bit smaller than otherwise, or is that not a permanent rule of thumb with all of them?

[ideasguy]

Hi Romayne
I'm impressed!
From the link in your posting above, Ive just visited your forum. That is a really noble effort.

Ive taken the link to your web site:
http://www.fmsni.org.uk/
and see its powered by Joomla.
My colleague at Belfast Telegraph has been at me to do a website using that content management software for ages.
Did you set that all up yourself?

[TKR99]

Yep - I've 3 sites now running on Joomla - took me about 8 months to get my head around it all, but once I'd got one site sorted, the rest weren't too bad.  Worst was the FMSNI site though as it had 100 pages + all of which had to be weeded out and cut back, plus I'd a lot of problems with the database corrupting and various other difficulties - steep learning curve, but trust me, if I could do it, anyone could!!   I chose Joomla out of all of the various CMS offereings because it had the nicest administration and a absolute bucketload of templates and mods/coms to play with unlike some of the others that (for me at least) seemed rather limited unless you were experienced.

Joomla also has a superb forum where you can get fairly quick help on any likely problem you run into, plus they have good documentation that's easy to work through.  I'd highly recommend it as a platform for anyone starting out in CMS.   You can get a great idea of what it's like to manage if you head to Joomla Demo on the CMS demos site - you can try out all the others there too.   Gives you at least an idea of what you'll see once you install any of them.  For me, it was far harder to get my head around the actual PHP database and I'm still learning on that one - you have to take regular backups through your CPanel/PHPMyAdmin regularly or you can end up having to lose everything and reinstall, and it's something I've not found anywhere you can really easily learn what's required - really is just diving in, messing it up, and then playing around to fix it (with a LOT of help from forum friends).  i've killed 1 of my sites twice over just through doing silly things sometimes, so you do have to be really careful, because unlike with your HTML sites, you won't have any means of accessing information to put it back up again if your database gets totally corrupted, hence the regular backups.

I'd be more than willing to help you out should you ever need it tho I'm sure you're more than capable of undertaking it as I'd zilch knowledge when I started out with it, and had no idea what it would be like until I set it up and just dived in learning as I went.

Thanks for the encouragement tho - nice when the work is noticed 

[Trevor Ellis]

Hoping someone can maybe provide me with some ideas on how to better landscape my tiny & I mean TINY yard garden.
Any suggestions appreciated 

Hi Romayne,

looking at the photograph that you posted and seeing the greenery on the brickwork, I wondered if you've thought about introducing a few ferns. There is obviosuly some damp there and there are many beautiful ferns, from largish to tiny,  which would flourish in the conditions that you have I'm sure. They're very healthy things to have around and very calming too. There's a few things about them in the 'Our Gardens' part of the forum if you're interested. Plants that would accompany them might be Phlox stolonifera which would give colour in the flowers, Hardy Begonia (Begonia Grandis) with colour in both leaf and flower, or maybe Arisaemas (draconitum and triphyllum) which would add a different, maybe a bit more exotic feel.

Good luck with your project,

Trevor

[3fren]

You are formidable, Romayne.

I like your high spirit ..seize life by the throat and strangle it !

Re your space, in Singapore we have tiny spaces and we make the best of it.
I have a bit of a problem attached pictures on this forum. 
Let me get some photos and email to you direct.  Would be great if George
can help post onto this page. (I am yet to try out the package ..George. had been travelling
like crazy.. it is a survival game)

Hear from me soon and await my photos.

We have lots of ferns here.  If it is allowed, I will collect and send some spores over and you try to grow them.
my email is : jessie insert@here cosa.com.sg

 

Edited by George
To Jessie
Hope you excuse me. Ive edited your psoting to disguise your e address form undesirables.

[3fren]

Re "Fibromyalgia" I wonder whether practicing Yoga might give some help.

I am with a Volunteer Yoga Group - http://www.yoganikam.com dealing with heartlanders
young and old..above 15yrs to above 60 years.

Our health is influenced by mainly : physical , mind, soul ( mental) , spiritual (thoughts), energy (Qi in Chinese) and diet .

We had people of all problems.  We are not healers but allevate and it is the practitioners who heals themselves
after receiving proper guidance.