Looking from just outside the sitting room French doors

I have been sat gazing at this for the past half hour. We have been working on it like navvies the last two days to try and get it somewhere near complete. There are a few small jobs to finish, such as putting sand between the bricks to point them, and adding a mixture of perennials to flower amongst all the roses.

But I am busting with pride, and so proud of  Kevin for all his graft too. Nothing that you see was here at the beginning of September 2011. The lovely Jonathan Nex built the loggia for us (it's been renamed the barn) from locally felled and milled cedar wood. He built it to fit the space between the trellis fencing we had erected to divide the garden into 3 spaces. Everything was purpose built and made on site using traditional joinery skills you just don't see these days; no flat packs here.

Next we removed all the grass, and double dug the whole area, adding stable manure as we went and doing our best to be rid of any perennial weeds.  We dithered for quite a long time what to do about the paths we wanted to lay. We knew we wanted the paths to intersect to create 4 good sized beds for roses and cottage garden flowers, but deciding on what material was difficult. The iGit favoured reclaimed brick, I favoured a mix of reclaimed York stone and  Staffordshire blue stable blocks.

Kismet settled the dispute when digging up a patio in another part of the garden we found hundreds and hundreds of Victorian bricks that would have been the foundations of old out buildings and the Vinery, from the properties earlier incarnation in late Georgian times.  Being underground for over 100 years, there was every chance the bricks would be suitable for laying the paths. So, we decided to recycle them and use them to make the paths in Rose World. If it doesn't work out and they prove not to be frost resistant, all we lost is our time should we have to re-lay it with a different brick later on.  For first timers I think we did a pretty decent job of the paths.

Looking back towards the cottage from the Loggia 

On Thursday, 160 box plants arrived in to boxes from Langley Boxwood . Rain prevented me planting them as hedges around each bed until yesterday evening. I continued today, and added 28 rose bushes to the mix too! There are clematis planted against the fences, along with climbing and rambling roses, and I intend to inter-plant the bush and shrub roses with Penstemons, Lilies, Campanulas, Digitalis, Sages, and various other cottage garden plants in a palette of pale blues, purples, mauves, pinks, whites and soft yellows.

This area of the garden is directly outside the sitting room. I have had a vision in my head of what I wanted to see from the French doors of the sitting room since we moved here.  I wanted to be able to open them on a warm day and walk into a rose garden, and have the perfume of the roses drift into the house.  It's almost there. This summer I should achieve my dream.  If I smile much more, my ears will fall in my mouth!