The wall

The southern part of our property has an “dramatic” border that ended in the woods with a 2m drop. I did clean that part of the property and used some soil from the green house digging to create two planting areas that would be good for planting some flowers or other plants of our choice.

The below images illustrate the evolution of the process. This was a tough effort, much trash needed to be disposed properly and the decomposed natural matter moved aside. I had some challenge with stinging nettles (Urtica) even wearing gloves. It’s a good thing though that these plants are quite useful in the garden. We may cook these, do tasty pesto variants, use as tea and they attract insects as well. So, at the end of the day…. I like having these plants in the garden, but not everywhere! 🙂

I was quite pleased with the wall and I did put on top of it some moss and other plants that fit the area. The whole thing turned out quite fine.

I had the idea of building a fireplace and a relax area behind it, but the whole area was unstable. I needed a solution. The thing is that I had other projects that needed my attention and this one had lower priority on my list. 🙂

Anyhow, this year I decided to build a proper wall that could solve the stability issue and give me the opportunity to do something with that tiny part of unused area of our property.
After some thinking and due to the simple fact that the whole wooden area vanished due to the owner of that area decided to cut all the trees after almost 80 years. The trees were enormous, huge and there was a quite high probability of them falling into our house during stronger storms. We were lucky that those trees that did fall went down in the “correct” direction. So, despite the aesthetic unpleasant view on a dead area of all the trees gone, we got some advantages:
– no more fear during storms
– less humidity
– more hours of sun
– a less “claustrophobic” environment

So, despite the loss of the fine green area, there were a few advantages now. Another advantage for us is the fact that we may plant more trees of our own. We couldn’t use like 30% of our property to do that before due to a constant shadow on that area. The thing that we need to think about will be the winds that are quite strong now due to the lack of protection.

During the last week of May in 2026, I decided to start the process of raising the wall and fixing the issue once and for all. I already needed to clean the below area that I intend to use for a room under the garage that I would like to build in the future so the stones were there, under the dirt and all, ready to be used.

This was not an easy task, but a week or so of work did produce the wanted result:

The below image is from the late summer 2026:

We are now ready to build a nice bench there where we could relax and have our tea or coffee to enjoy. I planted a lovely Wisteria frutescens ‘Blue Moon’  that will hopefully add that “romantic” touch.   🙂