It's an ill wind that blows nobody any good...

Like many, we have had strong winds over the winter. Over one weekend the fruit cage containing our raspberry canes was completely demolished by the wind. Our initial reaction was one of annoyance, but then we got to thinking... The raspberry canes were well past their best and needed replacing anyway, so this was a chance to make a positive out of a negative. We bought new canes, planted them in a different bed in the productive garden, and made a new fruit cage out of some tubes & fittings we had from when we had dismantled a previous cage. In the space we had freed up we erected a piece of trellis and planted the bed up with a lovely small crab Malus toringo 'Aros' which has dark leaves and a columnar habit, the highly scented and quite unusual Edgeworthia chrysantha 'Red Dragon' and two dwarf palmatum acers 'Little Princess' & 'Ben-Maiko', underplanted with Anemone blanda 'White Splendour' and some daffodils and crocus, the area finally sowed with grass seed. It will make an attractive addition to Sally's Patch, and in time actually look far nicer in that spot than the original fruit cage did!