Flaming June at last is with us, though the well known term does not actually describe the long anticipated hot sunny days of the month as everybody thinks, but it's the title of a pre-impressionist masterpiece depicting a slumbering curled up female figure clad lightly in startling orange (think Californian poppy) drapery painted by Sir Frederick Leighton and completed, unfortunately for him, in 1895 on the cusp of the imminent demise of the late Victorian classical style and so fell out of fashion almost before the paint was dry.
Has your garden fallen out of fashion? Is it not doing as it's told with some parts struggling to get going and other parts running away and out of control like a two year old escaped from its frantic grandfather in the mens section of M&S in the middle of a Dubai shopping mall?
Gardens can easily become out of control and unless you are an Alan Titchmarsh or a Monty Don, it's not easy to visualise the changing face of a garden over time, and how a newly planted garden will turn out in ten or twenty years time even though it might have been carefully planned out on a virtual drawing board in advance. Look in the mirror or old wedding photos of yourself ten or twenty years ago - do you still recognise that it's you? Have you changed so much? Of course you could attempt to delay or disguise the inevitable effects of time with anti wrinkle cream, or crinkle cream as a three year old Izzy used to call it, but a garden behaving in the same way, generally ignores your wants and needs and bye and large goes its own way with innocent looking shrubs and ornamental plants like the buddlia, phormium, ceanothus, cotoneaster etc in a very short time taking on the role of playground bullies muscling their way through your other prized, but weaker specimens with your garden now looking nothing like you thought it would.
One mature tree, for example, can suck up to 300 litres of water per day from the ground so in our increasingly dry climate, that's a lot of water being sucked up which amounts to well over 2 tons of the wet stuff being lost every week the upshot being what used to be a level plot, over time, can experience serious ground movement from expanding roots and dried out land producing undulations and slopes which, whilst being unplanned, can nevertheless with a bit of imagination, be the basis of a new feature in your garden and actually enhancing it with the construction of steps or terracing.
Izzy has made good use of her sloping site with a concrete and brick flight of steps leading up to her front door despite her dad complaining that it must be easier to climb the north face of the Eiger than to scramble up the steep crumbling and loose masonry steps to get to the front door and which requires a top up on his life insurance policy each time he makes a visit. So when you construct your steps in whatever material suits you best, keep them, like the river Jordan immortalised in song by Rod Stewart, Pete Seeger and others, deep and wide ie wide with deep treads and shallow risers and of course, they need to be solid and level!
P.S. Flaming June now resides in an art museum in Puerto Rico having being shunted around looking for a buyer and failing to meet even the most meagre reserve at auction and finally being picked up for next to nothing at an art shop in Amsterdam in the 1960s but since then becoming quite a celebrity having toured the world's most fashionable galleries and now worth millions.......talk about fickle fashion eh!
