The Battenburg cake has gone!!!

We promised ourselves when we moved into this house almost 18 months ago that the Battenburg cake path and balcony would be replaced. We're thrilled that our "new" garden was completed on Thursday this week.

We used Summers Gardens, who are based at Caerau Uchaf, near Bala (if you're ever in the area, do go and see their own gardens and treat yourself to some of the yummy cake that Stephanie bakes for their cafe - no I'm not on commission!). Toby did the design and suggested the materials (Indian stone and as a contrast some stone chippings) and despite my original reservations regarding more multi-coloured paving it definitely was the right choice and looks wonderful. We had some rain this afternoon and the colours look even more impressive when it's wet.

Toby and his lads came on Monday, 23 August, and amazingly all the old paving and walling was ripped up and in the skip by 4pm. They worked through heavy rain and wind for the first two days but for the rest of the first week the weather was pretty good. The second week the weather was glorious, summer came to north Wales at last!

Here are the before and after pictures, do click to enlarge them and see what a wonderful job Toby & Co have done.






















The border has been removed where the concrete planters were on the left hand side and the path taken right up to the fence, this has given the impression of much more width to a very small garden:














View from loft window:


We still have to sort out the borders, rescue some of the plants that were disturbed during the works, move plants around, decide what new stuff we want, plant up with new plants and bulbs. We have quite a bit more room now as the borders have been widened.

Pictures taken this morning when some of the pots had been brought back:



























The bird bath fits very nicely into this corner of the garden, Paul's cleaned it up and it looks like new:





















































We found a special place for our little sleepy elf - a drain has been formed in the bottom corner of the garden and he disguises it very nicely!














We're just hoping for a bit more nice weather now as we'd like to paint the pillars and wall around the balcony to match the house.

Thanks so much for coming to see our new garden, we hope you like it as much as we do.