An English Urban Garden.

I don't have naturally green fingers. I mean, I can keep a house plant alive and have managed cress on a flannel, but gardening doesn't come naturally to me.

But I have a garden. Obviously, because I live in London, it's postage-stamp sized - if you put a picnic rug down, the garden vanishes. But it's mine and I want to use it and make it pretty.

I'm aiming for a 'lawn'. It's a work in progress. I put down grass seed in April to fill in some gaps and... it didn't rain for three months. In England! No rain! The 'lawn' resembled the Serengeti. But then I went on holiday and apparently it rained non-stop here. I came back to this:

Much more grassier!

Unfortunately I don't have a lawn mower, just a strimmer. (I did actually trim it with kitchen scissors once. Not recommended.) I'm therefore not going to show you after-pictures as it's a bit uneven. But it's better, honestly.

And apparently tastes good.

When we bought the flat, the garden looked something like this:

(Sorry for the rubbish photo - old camera phone)

The majority of it was covered in the most wonky, badly laid concrete imaginable. I was firmly convinced there must be a body under it as there was no aesthetic reason anyone could have wanted that in their garden otherwise!

I smashed the concrete up a while back. Oddly enough, I did this whilst using just a claw hammer and a little purple bucket. This is also not recommended.

There was no body under there. Mostly a relief.

Since then I've been sporadically planting things, and each spring it looks a little bit better. I've even had some flowers this year!

And made it into a place I can actually spend some time. (When it's not raining...)

The sunflowers are out the front, because it's sunnier there. But look how big they've got! Still a wee way to go before they tower over the house and I can climb up them to find giants and golden chickens, but I remain optimistic.