Spring in the Garden

I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with gardening. I love plants…

… I hate that my body isn’t up to the physical side of gardening. When I was younger I quite liked the physical side. Then, around 28, I wound up with chronic neck pain and had to give up a lot of activities I enjoyed. So I paid a landscaper to do most of our garden and, since there were a LOT of drainage problems (house has flooded three times now) and the builders who renovated left the place looking like a tip, it wasn’t cheap. Whenever I’m tempted by the thought of selling this place and buying another, one of the deterrents it the thought of having to fix up a new garden.

There’s so much here that we tailored to our own needs. Like this huge cat run Paul built:

My favourite plant here is the nasturtiums. They grew all over the builder’s rubble, cheering me up when the whole thing had us feeling very low.

There’s a bit of a herb and vege garden at the end, but it’s looking a little sad and neglected at the moment. I haven’t had the energy or time to think about planting tomatoes this year. Though there’s still time…

Paul bought me this cool compost bin for my birthday. It rolls around on the base, aerating and mixing the contents with little effort (a big advantage when using a fork or shovel hurts), and you can roll it to the place you want to put the compost.

I love trees. We used to have two big ones. The pussy willow had to be removed, but I’m holding onto this flame tree for as long as I can. Usually it has the most amazing, almost fleuroescent red flowers, but this year the possums have got stuck in. Not much I can do about it. They get onto the tree from the neighbour’s house.

Beneath it the liliums are flowering. I removed them from the cat run after I found out they’re toxic to cats.

There’s what I think are irises, saved from the original garden along with ginger, which grows way too fast. In winter bluebells come up, transplanted from a friend’s garden a few years ago. Mostly I try to divide, take cuttings and adopt plants rather than buy new ones. A few years back, when the structural landscaping was done, I bought a few hundred dollars worth of plants. Mere months later I lost most of them during a particularly severe summer heatwave.

I replaced the tree I removed with a maple, which is looking healthy. It’ll be many, many years before it’s as big as the tree it replaced, though. I miss the shade of the old pussy willow, and how the local rosellas, cockatoos and parakeets would feast on the new flowers just outside my studio window.

The bottle brush is my favourite native. The first photo in this post is of a small ground cover in our front yard. I planted trees across the back fence. They should eventually provide a bit of privacy from the neighbour at the back. Though I haven’t seen him in a while, a creepy old guy used to stand there and grin at me when I was in the studio. Ew!

They make great cut flowers for the house, too.

During the drought, like many Aussie gardeners, I discovered succulents. Growing them was a bit hit and miss. I got a whole lot by walking around the local streets and taking a tiny piece off the hardy remnants of gardens lost to neglect since their owners died or moved on, and their descendants turned their homes into rental properties. The Camberwell market is a great source, too.

Then I made the mistake of buying a few plants from the supermarket, and introduced a fungus that killed almost everything. I had to start again. They’ve finally started to thrive again. I have them all around the base for the water tank.

The one stretch of garden I haven’t been able to do anything with since moving here six years ago is the beside-the-driveway bed. There have been issues with the neighbour. But this post is long enough already. I’ll save that story for another time.

2 thoughts on “Spring in the Garden

  1. Those are iris, my mom’s favorite. Did you know that if you have one white iris in with your colored iris, they will bloom in color the first year they are together and then the next year all the iris will be white.

    The bottle brush bush is beautiful. I like how you have your birdbath surrounded with the succulents. Our gardens have been neglected this year. We’ve had horrible droughts and we’re under water restrictions where we can only water by hand, no sprinklers.

    • We had pretty severe drought conditions until a couple of years ago, when we had floods. It’s a familiar cycle, part of the Aussie climate, though the droughts seem to get more severe every time.

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