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.

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.

There is never much to show at this time of the year because we are getting the garden ready for the spring showing. This means much weeding, cutting back, and replanting. But I had a lovely surprise yesterday. The old almond tree started a new branch a couple of years ago, and this year it is full of blossom. Last year, I didn't see more than three or four blossoms on the whole tree. This year the dear old thing is about to have quite a showing.

The photo on the left is of the new branch that is growing from the bottom of the tree. The photo on the right is a branch from the old tree. You can't see much but there is also quite a bit of blossom there.

I had to think for a while about the name of this section of the garden. The remains of a rudimentary chicken enclosure still remain beyond the secret path but the area was probably not touched for fifty years. We never thought we would get this done, but it is now weeded and planted with the purple plants, cuttings of artemesia and another plant with silver foliage. Yesterday, we added acanthus, because it is an old plant that would have been popular 160 years ago, and a swathe of English violets, because of Davenport's interest in the perfume industry. I hope it will remain this way, very plain, and relying on colour groups.

I must admit that I never thought I would get this area weeded. Quite a number of times I had friends who came and helped but we could never get it finished and it all grew back by the next year. It was my dream to see this part of the garden looking civilised because it shows from the road and gave a bad impression to people walking past, who think this area is a wilderness. This is how it looked before we started. There was a huge heap of building rubbish, old clay soil, broken bricks and stones piled high with cuttings no one had bothered to move. You can see here that the cottage garden is not yet developed.

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First my sister, Robyn, and her husband, Steve, and I tossed and sorted the bricks and stones, many of which I used for borders around the rest of the garden. We broke up the branches and disposed of them. Then we threw all the awful builders' soil all around, anywhere we could find a dip.
In the years after this, it was all absorbed into the garden. We had a sloped area and the weeds and periwinkle continued to grow. The next year, a couple of friends, Thea and David, came from Melbourne and stayed with me, and they came to the garden to help me, and pulled up a million periwinkle runners. At least half grew back by the next year, but much more spindly and weaker.That was about three years ago.
This year, I've had a lovely garden helper, Noel, an Irish comedian, who is pretty serious about pulling up periwinkle. He has worked for weeks on this and today we finished! It's now all clear and shaped. Next week I will plant it all out with violets.
​I want it to to be a discreet and shady place.  I planted silver bushes all around the pear tree and purple things (my plant knowledge is hopeless but I'm good with colours) running down the slope. I hope by summer it looks stunning but I'm an optimist. It will probably take a year.
So, this completes my secret way through from the marquee pad path, to the olive grove. It's a very curvaceous path and can't be photographed in one go. The photos below show the development.

Everything to the right of the photo has been removed. The twisted old wire has now gone and a very twisty path runs through. The downhill side (which you can't see here) will possibly not be developed but 'we'll see.'

I kept weeding and making a shape. It's rather hilly there. We planted Agapanthus and Clivea as a border. You can see the beginning of the purple plants and perhaps an idea of the silver ones. Below is how it looks today. You can see all the way through to the olive grove. As I said above, I'll need to do some planting but the shape is the thing. Once it is there, all is right in the world.

I don't have anything new to show because I have been working on a secret path from the lower cottage garden into the olive grove. It will join an even more secret path that will run through the overgrowth to somewhere else in the olive grove. So, instead of the half finished path, I'll let you see pretty photos of other parts in the garden. 

Because the weather is so hot, I don't have any different photos to show of the cottage garden but I took a few early this morning of the main garden that gets a lot more water and shade than the cottage garden gets. That is changing. Very soon my garden will be connected to the bore system too and I will have far more time to do the gardening. Mainly this year I have been trying to keep the plants hydrated, which is a fancy way of saying 'watered.
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