I'm not in a rush to get rid of them, not exactly, just not sure how long you can have them (and possibly neglect them) before they get too leggy to be salvaged. I'm not convinced the previous owners were big gardening people, and whilst there are some good plants and shrubs in the garden it's a bit of a wilderness. The front garden is mostly a waste of time and space (moss, awkward shape, waterlogged, full of rubbish thrown over our hedge - hate it!) but there's a bed in the middle that is curiously egg-shaped and filled with an assortment of heathers and then covered with ... can't think of the word... large flat chips of stone anyway. Shale or something. The heathers don't exactly fill the border and it looks like someone intended it to be a rockery (there are a few large unshapely boulders there) but it's actually flat. My mum's an avid gardener and it has fazed her too.

so the bed really needs work on and I'm not sure whether these heathers would stand up to being shoved around. I also have a couple of nice ones in the back garden under some overgrown pyracanthae. I actually have about 3 separate bushes of pyracantha which is too much for any one tiny garden I'm sure, but they gave me early winter colour so I'm not chopping them just yet either. The heathers flowered earlier in the season and when they died off I hacked about at them like a madwoman with some sharp shears and some of them are having a second flowering, which is a good sign. I'm usually not the timid kind with shears and often that's good. But the biggest problem is just not being able to stand on the grass to do anything.

I hacked out a mahonia before the end of Autumn... it was in completely the wrong place and was suffering really. I wasn't a big fan anyway so it went. Well... it got cut down but most of it is still sitting in puddles on the grass. If we want to dispose of our garden waste here we need to get it in the car and take it round to the tip (about 5mins by car!) which is a bit of a hassle compared to the people who actually pay for special bins. We already have three of these large bins at the side of the house and a 4th would just be impossible.

It's been helpful though to just be able to watch because I've been forced to pay attention to the plants, see how things are working or not, and plan ahead as to what needs doing. I have plenty of guidance from Mum too, so I don't anything really drastic without checking first.

the green bulb shoots are definitely up in my wall so theyll likely get frosted! I also dumped three large patches of bulbs in an area I cleared under the bird food, next to a half dozen pyracanthae bits... snowdrops and... crocus maybe. I did keep the packets but I can't remember offhand! Hopefully the birds and cat have left them alone enough for them to come up a bit later. It should be a pretty drift of woodland flowers. That's the vision, but I'll let you know how reality works!

Kerri.

ps. ahhh... callunas are the heathers and ericas are heaths apparently. Well you learn something new every day!