Virginia Taylor - Author

​During the early part of the year, I ceased working in the garden for a time, having done all I could without help. In the meantime, I bought one house and sold the other, and shifted a third of my worldly goods a few kilometres away.
Last week, I finally had time to see what had happened to my garden while I hadn’t been there. Turns out that the magical garden gnomes had been silently helping me.
I couldn’t see anyone when I arrived so I began to wander. Amazingly, everything looked great. The red garden was in top shape, the cottage garden looked well groomed, and someone had removed the new shoots on my tiny supply of olive trees.
I ventured forward down the path. Everything still looked great, but in the distance I could hear voices in conversation. Following the sound, I walked to the end of the surrounding wall of the marquee pad and looked down. A group of men stood gossiping. 
Par for the course. The men do a lot of talking, except my favourite garden gnome, Noel. Naturally I called out to them and said nothing very interesting and they told me to come on down.
Noel went back along the under-path saying he had something to show me. What I saw was a very neat, mulched path to the old fig tree where we had worked so hard the year before. The tree had finally been freed from the old wire fencing that had been strangling it for the past twenty years. The sun had been let in and new growth was beginning to show. 
However, the path continued on, and curled right down to the back fence.
I never imagined we would ever get this far, because the maintenance of the rest of the garden kept us too busy. But not only had the guys reached the back, they had picked up all the rocks and stones I had (very efficiently) gotten rid of by throwing them over the marquee pad. These shocking eyesores had been scrunched up into long rows of edging. 
This path led the way to the old glass house, whose frame and glass had disappeared some years ago. All that remained was the brick floor, which the guys had decided would be a great little gossip spot. (Guys love gossip spots.) They had arranged a few old logs around the edge as seating.
But this story is still not over. 
The mulched and edged path did a right hand turn and began to aim at the main garden. Through a series of twists and quite a bit ducking overhanging branches, we made our way right to the other garden. 
 
At last the two gardens have been joined into one.

Today was cold but sunny, a perfect day for gardening. Now all the areas are finished, I have a heap of maintaining to do, mostly cutting back and tidying. The weather is crazy, as everyone knows. Although it has been winter for the past month, the trees haven't quite lost their leaves. The old pear is doing a rather pretty autumn leafing, but today I wanted to show the progression of the path to the marquee pad. It's very green now because so much has been cut back and the sun shines in. I pruned the chrysanthemums today and pulled out a few weeds.
I'm waiting for my main helper to come back from his holidays and prune a few more fly bushes. I want a nice regrowth this spring.
​Below is a 'before' photo from a few years ago, and the other one was taken today.
The first photo underneath with the weird little bird bath is the garden on the left of the second top and the other is a snippet of the Red Garden (because it looked nice today.)

Most of my work in the garden is maintenance. The weather is too hot at this time of year to plant and we have a kangaroo who has been eating my purple plants. I have more waiting, but I am hoping the kangaroo will leave the area, first. In the meantime, I am clipping a few plants back and making shapes more pleasing to my eye. As soon as the weather cools down, I will begin to separate and replant the sedums in the Red Garden in the areas where I cut back the succulents that were trying to conquer me. I think I can give the area a more gentle appearance when they have been thinned. My hope is to incorporate a few salvia there too.
So, while not a lot is happening in the garden, I still have a few plants that are flowering, and my first and only apple has finally made it through the heat and the frosts.

At this time of the year, while the weather is hot, about all we can do in the garden is maintenance. I have spent the past month or two keeping the plants in shape, and by that I mean trimming. The roses have to keep being dead-headed and the plants that cope well in the hot weather need to be cut back or they will take over. Now that I have a watering system in place, I can spend the whole time on the plants. I took photos to compare them with the photos of about four years ago. 

In the first you can see all the way down the hill. In the second the plants have grown large enough to hide the tiers. I don't think any of those original plants are still there except for the Bougainevillia. The next photos are taken from the other side of the 'cottage,' an area I never expected to develop, but it has evolved regardless and looking quite colourful. 

At this time of the year, everything is growing and blooming. In the dry part of the garden, around the pear tree, all the tiny cuttings I put in a few months ago have decided to live and grow. The secret path garden is nicer every week. A few photos from last week. The first photo is of the new garden under the fig tree, where the colour theme is pink and blue. The second is across the path and along the secret path, where the colour theme is red, orange, yellow, and blue.

This next photo is something I may not see again, tiny pears on the oldest pear tree in South Australia.

The last is purely atmospheric. I love the shapes of the plants here.

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.

I rarely have time to attend to this part of the garden and rely mainly on helpers. The problem here is that the succulents that were planted there initially because they didn't require watering grow at a great rate and swamp the other plantings. At certain times of the year, they look good. At the moment they look okay and the geranium hedge looks wonderful. It has recently been clipped. If I ever find the time, I will clip the pines into an oval shape.
The first photo here shows the spot after we had cleared out all the weeds and finished the first plantings, mainly succulents moved from other spots on the property.
The second photo shows how well the hedge grew after we put the cuttings in. Remember, this is a garden that relies on rain for water. The big hebe hedge is amazing. It has never hinted that it wants watering. In summer the other plants shrivel a bit, but not Lady Hebe. She manages well. The mulberry in the centre also sees to be drought resistant. We did well in this spot.

The above photo was taken yesterday - almost the last day of winter. The rainfall has been good this year and the geranium hedge has just been clipped. We also try to keep the hebe clipped. If you click on the photo you can see it in full size. Note how enormous the mulberry is now. The patch looks like a well established garden these days.