How To Change The Look Of A Summer Cottage

2024 Author: Sebastian Paterson | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 13:47

New ideas for your garden

On autumn and winter evenings, when we already miss our beloved gardens, when looking at photographs of summer colored landscapes, new ideas will certainly come to our minds that we have not yet had time to bring to life last summer. There is time to think, make a few sketches, choose the best one and gradually prepare materials for its implementation.

Spring, summer is the best time to somehow transform the usual look of the garden. Sometimes it is enough to add a little small details to the garden landscape, and it immediately revives, changes the mood of the hosts and guests. Moreover, transformations can be done throughout the season, and not only in the spring. In addition, in the summer, the "roughness" of the garden decoration is very clearly visible, they must be written down immediately so as not to miss anything later. These records will help you draw up an improvement plan during the winter, as well as schedule the purchase of the necessary plants.

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You can start right from the entrance to the site. Craftsmen can transform a gate or gate with a wooden sculpture in the style that is closer in spirit to your garden. Here you can meet "guardians of the place" in the form of stylized birds, horse heads, woodmen and even mermaids on the bank of a small pond. And, mind you, all the material at hand is that which is uprooted and most often simply burned. The roots, washed from the ground, show the most unexpected silhouettes and interweaving of underground branches.

It is also possible to organize a competition: who best reflects in the title the meaning of the statue, which has been waiting for its finest hour underground for so long. Cuts of old trees can also serve as supports for lianas and bird houses, hanging baskets with annuals, viols, fuchsia and other floral plants.

The gate, the fence will even decorate the annual vines, which can be planted in container "packaging" at any time: morning glory with purple flowers - gramophone, echinocystis (wild cucumber) with lush greenery - fluffy flowers and many fruits with "wet" insides. Echinocystis fruits at the end of the season are harvested, dried and used in floristic compositions. It is better to sow its seeds before winter, then there will certainly be seedlings in spring (they do not always germinate with spring sowing).

Fragrant hops are good on posts and gate gates. More durable, of course, will be perennial ordinary hops, which are propagated by root cuttings and layering. If you plant female and male specimens next to each other, then the dense greenery on the supports, trellises, and the fence net will be revived at the end of summer with light green cones - the healing fruits of hops.

If your site is fenced off with a fence, a net, but you want to decorate them and hide from the immodest gaze of neighbors, you should plant maiden grapes along the fence. This unpretentious, durable liana will braid any plane with a dense carpet, and what a crimson, with blue-black berries (inedible!) The living wall will become in the fall! The maiden grape is one of the most elegant types of lianas in our strip.

Propagated grapes by layering throughout the season, as well as winter cuttings before bud break. Cuttings with two or three buds are planted in the spring, laying horizontally in a narrow groove along the fence, to a depth of 8-10 cm. A hedge of vines is necessary in those gardening areas that are in the city, to protect the site from the harmful exhaust gases of many cars.

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Unlike sheared hedges made of cotoneaster, barberry, conifers and other species, maiden grapes do not require cutting and special care. Adding humus and full mineral fertilization in the spring is all he needs. Planting material grown in containers allows grapes and any other type of plants to be planted throughout the season. Lianas of Amur grapes, woodworm are used in a similar way.

The arches of greenhouses will greatly benefit if you let the shoots of decorative beans, sweet peas, echinocystis run along them. In other places, a support is made for these vines in the form of a hut made of willow twigs, tied at the top in a bundle with twine. When the plants bloom, you get an elegant cone. Place such a "small architectural form" in a sunny place.

In sunny places, including between bushes of raspberries, blackberries, decorative sunflowers (and even Jerusalem artichoke) will look great. Now on sale there are many varieties of them with various colors (not only yellow, but also red-brown, bronze) and double inflorescences.

I would like to decorate outbuildings for various purposes and, if necessary, disguise them with floral plants. High garden balsams, Jerusalem artichoke, musk mallow, Sakhalin mountaineer, Golden ball rudbeckia, lavater, summer chrysanthemum successfully decorate compost containers, toilets, sheds and other structures.

Balsams, lavater, summer chrysanthemum grow as giants, sometimes above 1.5-2 m, often self-seeding. But it is better to sow lavater and chrysanthemum in the spring under a film, chrysanthemum seeds can be scattered in free places in late autumn. Musk mallow is an ancient plant, it has been grown in front gardens since ancient times, it may well create a living summer hedge, and if you do not cut its stems for the winter, then in spring they look almost like thin bleached bamboo.

Highlander Sakhalin is one of the giant decorative buckwheat that grows annually up to 2 meters or more in height. A very good plant if you need to fence yourself off from neighbors or depict a grove in an oriental taste: its stems are knotty, reddish and curved at a slight angle. But it should be borne in mind that the plant spreads easily, so it is worth limiting the place of "residence" to a vertically buried strip of slate or metal, plastic.

The benches are transformed if you put arches or vertical trellises above them and plant perennial climbing plants: species clematis (the most unpretentious) and large-flowered groups of Zhakman, honeysuckle honeysuckle blooming with fragrant exotic flowers, actinidia kolomikta, maiden or Amur grapes. An even greater effect is produced by vines planted along the garden path, over which decorative arches are installed. Maybe arches from old greenhouses were left idle on the site, over which they no longer stretch the film?

At the base of each such arch, you can plant any perennial or annual liana. For starters, you can get by with annual species. The purpose of this garden corner will change accordingly, because everything in our life is changing. And then on your site there will be ancient elements of garden decoration under the beautiful name berso, which means "green avenue". Such alleys were used to create the Summer Garden and the Upper Peterhof Park at the beginning of the 18th century.

Openwork lattices installed near the southern walls of the house perfectly braid any vines and even some varieties of gooseberries (Houghton). The combination of perennial and annual species allows you to diversify the color and texture of the leaves (for example, honeysuckle, honeysuckle with opposite, bluish-green leaves and echinocystis with light green, whole leaves). Even the most modest, small garden house, decorated with maiden grapes, turns into a cozy, attractive dwelling, changing its appearance in accordance with the change in the color of the vine leaves. The brightest sight appears before our eyes in autumn.

Very effective in the garden are containers, baskets with blooming pelargoniums, fuchsias, oleanders, roses, lantana, asklepias, as well as various annuals and viola. Large pots and boxes with begonia, petunia, tagetes, lavatera, lobelia, ageratum, alyssum, cornflowers, mirabilis, verbena, godetia, nasturtium, escholzia and other species can be placed in front of the house, on the terrace and balcony, on the ladder against the wall, along the paths, on the recreation area, at the entrance to the garden.

Wide low vases with graceful blue and blue lobelia are perfectly complemented by low ever-flowering white begonia and lilac ageratum. On a paved area of white and bluish stone, this composition brings coolness on a hot sunny day. Container landings are convenient in that they can always be moved to the most important place in order to focus on it today.

The oblong containers allow you to create in them a colorful mix of the most stable and elegant annuals: tall semperflorence begonias, "lined" with compact white and pink begonias, as well as blue lobelia, snow-white fragrant alissum, lilac ampelous ageratum. This mini flower garden is irresistibly bright and attractive from June until frost. Well, how can you give up the annuals, which many gardeners are afraid of or do not like to grow! After all, it is the Letniki that literally continuously, profusely bloom in our northern latitudes since the beginning of summer and often throughout the fall, shining with the brightest, juicy colors, curly and carved leaves, amaze with the velvet of their petals and a varied, delicate aroma.

Last season, city streets and squares were decorated with unusual vertical "multi-storey vases". Various annuals were planted in their tiers: ampelous petunias of bright colors, lobelia, viola, begonias, ageratum and other annuals. In the fall, they were replaced with gorgeous small-flowered chrysanthemums with a spherical bush and different types of inflorescences: non-double, like chamomile, but with white, pinkish, yellowish marginal flowers; with terry creamy yellow baskets, pale pink and other varieties.

City streets and gardens began to resemble photos from good floriculture magazines. I would like to talk about this because it is always interesting to learn about some new technical solutions for flower decoration. In this case, for sure, the craftsmen in the garden, at the request and sketch of the main gardeners of the site, will come up with something to arrange a multi-storey vase from improvised, but always beautiful materials.

All kinds of containers of the most unexpected and unconventional forms can not only be placed around the garden, balconies and terraces, but also hung on the porch, on trees, poles, various supports, under the lanterns - this will pleasantly diversify the decoration of the garden and make it even more attractive and elegant.

E. Kuzmina, florist