All brown thumbs

Don't be gross. All Brown Thumbs is obviously the antonym (i.e. opposite) for Green Fingers and they are a perfect description to suit my abilities in the garden.

Looking after plants should be the easiest thing in the world. You stick them in or outdoors, depending on their instructions, water them whenever the soil goes dry, remove any weeds,  dead head them, etc etc. Ideally, especially with robust plants, they will take root, grow, produce flowers and seeds and all those pretty things the world likes to see.

It turns out I'm great at letting weeds grow, but find it very difficult to keep anything other than a bamboo plant alive. In the latter case, the trick is to stick it on your living room table, occasionally change its water and leave it be. However, whenever I buy little herb pots from the supermarket, most of them die within days - except for basil, which I've managed to just keep alive by sticking it on the windowsill outside my kitchen and watering it nearly every day, even when it rains!! So just in case you're ever over for dinner at my house, there's a good chance that basil will be the primary fresh herb around which the dish is themed.

Here's the dilemma. Having recently moved to this incredible house in the middle of nowhere, our even more incredible landlady has completely redone our back garden for us. This patch of about 5x30 metres (an totally generous portion, I must admit) spent it's first five months in our care gradually becoming more overgrown with crazy thistle-based weeds. Boyfriend seemed to have missed this entirely and so when I came back from Vietnam I was greeted by weeds almost as tall as me, and very little time or patience to remove them. It was becoming a proper jungle out there!!

Our newly refurbished garden

However, these have all been completely removed. We have a little paved patio at the beginning of the garden, where we can sit out in the sun on those rare beautiful days, and a path leading down to the end of the garden where we have a newly erected garden shed. In between all that, we have a pebble-dashed area to keep the weeds out, with little soil filled areas where we can plant out flowers, bushes, herbs, etc. It's totally spectacular, and yet I have no idea what I'm going to put in these patches!! Hence the issue of being all brown thumbs comes into play. What can I plant, and how can I keep these plants alive?

Any ideas would be massively helpful. I'm making the first plot my herb garden, and I've planted my small rosemary plants and my tomato plant there. Come spring, I'll buy a ton of herb seeds from Wilko's, toss them in there, and see what crazy herb combination I come up with. Shame it isn't hot enough in this country to grow some fiery hot chillis!!! 

 I don't know what I'm planning to put in the other plots yet though. Boyfriend wants to get some blackberry bushes, because he wants to relive his childhood and spend every September stuffing his face until his teeth and tongue turn purple. I'm fine with that - I can make blackberry crumble and blackberry ice cream. Yum! I'm hoping to get a nice rose bush, although I don't want to spend a ton of money on that. You can make roses grow from cutting right? Does anyone want to give me any rose cuttings? I'm partial to yellow roses myself, but I'm not really that fussy. Otherwise, I'm at a loss.

The problem of course is that without a car, we can't very well drive over to a nearby garden centre and pick up everything we need. We've been away every weekend and will be away next weekend as well, and between the commute and being at work during the week, we simply haven't had a chance to get on with this. But winter is coming, and get on with it we must.