Garden tour: the first tier

I suppose, now I've wibbled on for a week, that some idea of the garden layout might be helpful. When I originally described the plot as a "tiered garden", I probably gave the wrong impression. That phrase, no doubt, conjures up vistas of beautifully landscaped Italian gardens, perched high on Tuscan hilltops, with tall poplars, exquisite statues, fountains and grottos. Ha! Not quite. In fact, this Argyll garden staggers erratically (very like its current occupier) up a wet hillside, lurching from bare rock, to bog, to brambles before eventually collapsing in a disorganised heap against some "stock proof fencing". Beyond that there's what was optimistically described, in the estate agent's details, as open farmland, a small, muddy paddock backing onto a belt of scrub that leads in turn to forestry planting.

Let's start at the bottom with the first "tier". The kitchen door opens onto a flagged walkway and immediately the first step up onto a mossy, stone-walled bank with a red gravel path. The steps carry on up the hillside, bisecting the whole garden. On either side, there are areas which, for want of a better word, I shall describe as "flowerbeds". When I moved in there was a lot of hard landscaping, bare rock and well-weeded bark mulch. There were some absolutely gorgeous rhodies, azaleas and camelias, a few struggling heathers, a couple of unhappy roses, and a robust pampas grass, but to my eyes there was an awful lot of empty ground and little, after the Spring burst, to encourage wildlife. I know you're not meant to do anything with a garden for the first year, just to see what pops up but it was so bare after the rhodies had flowered, I couldn't resist the odd dibble. Last year I added Mum's verbascum and wall flower, a sea holly, a weigela, some campanulas, slug resistant hostas and allowed wildflowers, in particular foxgloves, to self seed everywhere. The last two pics show the first tier today.