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Unique entrance
The starting position
Our passage from parking to entrance is indeed depressing and muddy. We have removed the old concrete slabs in a variety of designs that used to make up our walkway (Image 1) and are saving them for later. Who needs a gym card when you have an old house? The house has been drained and instead of flamboyant plants, you now have to make do with lovely clay soil (Picture 2). The garage ramp is excavated and has a significant difference in height on each side (Image 3). When the project starts, a pile of concrete that was carted away when replacing the sewer in the basement rests in the garage driveway.
Support for the clay
Clay soil in all its glory (yes, it's easy to shape), but at a certain limit retaining walls are actually required. The brick was the only thing for the project we didn't have in our collection corner in the garden, so we had to buy it. Oh how smart it is with today's wall system! No masonry skills are required, just some experience of building with Lego. We pad the substrate, lay a drainage hose behind the intended wall and can then start stacking (Image 1). On with an anchoring net and then layer two, three, etc. (Image 2). We build a wall in the shape of an angular "U" and a straight wall. The top is crowned by limestone slabs that we found under the old balcony (Image 3). For the lazy, a staircase is built from waste wood.
Now that the garage driveway has walls in the form of retaining walls, it is time to lay a new old floor. We use the old concrete slabs that were on the former entrance hall. It feels good, both for the wallet and for the soul, to use the same tiles that the first homeowners chose with care. The old tiles also have a nice patina in the form of moss and coatings. To soften the edges, we let the area with concrete slabs be edged with cobblestones of varying sizes. The stairs in the retaining wall have been treated with black tar oil and filled with a slab of sea rock that we had from a previous project. On the slope, giant dewlap, funkia and ornamental grass now grow.
After a long period of focusing on clay and stone, it's finally time for our green friends - the perennials - to take over this part of the garden. The flat area outside the garage door is adorned by a Magnolia Black Tulip, a lime-green Japanese maple and a dense carpet of spotted lungwort and lace cap (picture 1). The garage driveway is connected to the garden fence with a large trellis that is joined by wisteria, honeysuckle, three types of clematis as well as white-flowered Caucasian forget-me-not and pink fist (picture 2).
Entrance hall
At this point the garage ramp (used only for bikes) is finished but we are still slogging through mud getting to our front door. We are considering many solutions for our new entrance hall. We would like to use the material we have in the garden, but at the same time have a path that is easy to shovel and can withstand the rolling of garbage cans, etc. We finally decide on a sweeping path of hard-packed rock flour lined with stone we had left over from the construction of our parking lot. The corridor opens into a larger parking area for bicycles and a dustbin, also made of packed stone flour. Although we like to dig, we realize that this project is too much for our backs and small shovels. We therefore use the help of an excavation company to get the structure. Unfortunately, we do not have images for this part of the project measuring at least 600 dpi.
Plants, plants, plants
The corridor is now lined with fragrant perennials of different heights and with different flowering times. The colors go from white to dark blue via light pink and burgundy. We like butterflies and bees so there will be a lot of peonies, lavender and sage. Most of the perennials are cut from older perennials in the family and from other parts of our garden. It's absolutely fantastic about plants - that they can be propagated time and time again. To spice up the long flower beds, we work at height with Japanese ornamental cherry, stemmed lilac, pearlbush, widje hydrangea and magnificent magnolia that are embedded in the flower beds. Finally the base is ready - now it's just a matter of enjoying the crunch under shoes and bicycle wheels and waiting for the plants to take off so that we get rid of all the bare soil and all the weeds that flourish. For this big project, we had to get bricks and bring in digging help to build the gravel walkway. Otherwise, we have worked as far as possible with old treasures from the garden that have been given a new task and a new place.
Enjoyment
Now we enjoy the reward of our toil. With stone in all its forms in combination with green, you go a long way.
