Virginia Taylor - Author

I have been promising to reveal this area for quite a while, but first I needed the path mulched. It's all done now. If you have been reading this blog, you will know that I started the Cottage Garden some years ago, meaning only to put a demure garden in front of the construction known as The Cottage. That expanded to fixing The Red Garden and then flowed down to the Lower Garden. That whole area had been filled with the feral blow fly bush and the invasive periwinkle.
 Below, the beginning of making this part of the garden.

You can see above that I weeded and you can see the old wire frame supporting the old Pandorea. The rest is weeds, but I have edged the path to the marquee.
Below is the photo of the path we made behind the frame to the old chicken run, which I used to store weeds, hoping they would turn into mulch. The path ends there.

Below is what happened the next year. Everything I planted died. Also I didn't have time to look after it.

Then I was allowed to take down the frame and take the path further. I had in mind what I wanted to do, but I still didn't have time. Then I got a helper who loved the idea as much as I did.

Last week I re-weeded and removed the periwinkle that had grown back since the last weeding. I have been cutting bits off the blowfly bushes, most of which will remain with a bit of judicious pruning to keep the area green, because it won't be watered. It will have to survive the same way it has for many years, on its own.Finally, the whole path is finished. All I have to do now is wait for everything to grow. We will put a white Pandorea over the trellis. The rest of the area is planted with red geraniums, white daisies and chrysanthemums, orange clivea, blue dog bane, and yellow lyriopes. You can now see to the marquee pad on one end, and to the olive grove on the other.

When I started working in the garden, this plumbago area was an eyesore. The bush hadn't been pruned for years and was a great tangle. A pile of rocks sat underneath. My sister, who was helping at the time, took hours and hours and pruned it to a reasonable shape but it was mainly sticks when she had finished and it looked like this. I got to and fixed the rocks but they hadn't been done before this photo.

Finally, it grew into this. Very pretty and soft.

Then a truck came around that corner with a delivery and knocked the wall into next year. Finally, one of the guys pruned it again. See below. Half the rocks had disappeared by this time and the dirt had been scattered everywhere. But I could at least get to the wall and rebuild it. I was too busy to fix it for at least six months though it could have been longer.

All done now, finally. I have planted dog's bane around the root base. It should look good next year.

It has taken many years to get the path to the marquee pad looking lovely. At first I wasn't allowed to make a path there. It caused me a certain amount of pain, because a path there seemed to be logical. The area was full of the invasive periwinkle and the old fig tree was being smothered on the right side and nothing except weeds and a strange old iron frame existed on the left side. An old Pandorea was struggling to grow over this. But I wanted a path there, least of all because it made life easier for me. We had morning tea on the marquee pad and that was the short way to get there. Below is the sneaky little clearing, but with no development whatsoever. Just a  way through.

Then I started working on the left hand side, weeding, pulling up the periwinkle and trying to make the Pandorea grow nicely on what I called 'the old mattress springs.' That's what the edifice looked like, just the metal innards of a mattress. Behind was kind of an old chicken coop, which I initially used as a compost heap.
Last year, a wonderful event happened. We decided to work as a team to weed around the marquee pad and plant a mainly blue/silver/cream garden. That proved a huge success and has within this year grown into a beautiful spot. At the same time, the pruning expert had a go at the 150 year old fig tree (on the right below) and made a lovely shape out of it, retaining all the old parts and renovating them, as it were. More about that part of the garden in another post, later in the year.
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So, we still had morning tea on the marquee pad, but now we had a view to the path I had now made. We could see the horrible old metal frame as a feature. The other gardeners agreed with me that the area would look quite wonderful without it and we finally had permission to get rid of it. This gave me an opportunity to make a 'secret path' through there to the olive grove on the left hand side. On the other side, I continued the garden that had been planted on the marquee pad, but changing the colour scheme to add pink as well. That is still growing and should be good pretty soon. At the moment, it is still trying.

The above photo was taken this week. The olive mulchings are being used on the path. Each side has grown more but you can't see the secret path on the left from there. I have used plant that flower in red, orange, yellow and white in that spot. It is already looking cheery and is almost good enough to feature in my next post. I'm just waiting for more mulching on the path. Can you see the tiny blossoms on the 150-60 year old pear tree? It is going to look gorgeous this year.