First spring roses.

Long hiatus...

First roses of a rubbish, freezing cold, ridiculously wet spring. 

Strawberry Hill

Front fence, Strawberry Hill back left (Anthemis, Thyme, Nepeta, Alyssum and Dianthus also in flower)

Bedroom window with Crepuscule finally getting some height. Also Iceberg below, with Erigeron in flower. 

First Crepuscule bloom of season. 

Bonica? $2 standard unlabelled rose rescue. Bumble Bee salvia and Erigeron underneath. 

Golden Celebration. 

First buds on Fairy Moss (with lobelia and alyssum). 

Radio Times and Nettle-leaved campanula. 

Radio Times environmental shot with Apricot tree, Campenula, Californian Poppy, Maireana sp, pink cosmos, lavender, nepeta, cut-leaf coriander. 

Munstead Wood. 

Ever lurid Sophy. 

Black Boy starting to gain some much needed height on shed. 

White Wings, enormous and brief blooms. 

Devoniensis. 

Salvia garden

So beautiful I've pulled out the decrepit vegetable beds and I'm making it a whole lot bigger...

June glories.

There is something very special about winter in Adelaide. The garden is quiet and damp, and completely lovely in a scruffy kind of way. 

'Sophy's Rose' is my June stalwart. 

'Cramoisi superieur' putting on a surprise show. 

Hidden hollyhocks under the apricot tree. 

Terrible photo of Chocolate Cosmos and Pelargonium reniforme. 

Pelargonium sidoides, love love love this one. 

Salvia leucantha under the apricot. 

Alyssum 'Snow White'

Acacia iteaphylla goes nuts at this time of year (red-flowering Japanese quince behind)

Mini gerberas and blue lobelia in a pot. 

Dwarf calendula, my favourite buff yellow. 

Fairy pelargonium (forget species) with a saltbush I totally forget the name of (Maireana erioclada?)

Pineapple sage, birds love this one (lemon behind). 

Rosa 'Crepuscule' under our bedroom window. Can hardly wait until it's bigger!

Volunteer nasturtium (one of lots, no wonder it's a weed in these parts). 

Lastly, the new garden corner, most plants in except for the roses which should arrive soon. 

Next up, mulch.

Two bales of peastraw mulch, and a makeshift curved bench made out of spare recycled red brick (not fixed in place in any way, which is good because I want to tweek it ever so slightly to the left, I expect I'll do that within the next five years or so). 

And a box of some of my green recruits.  

I gave up planting after the first four or so plants after my toddler was getting a bit too helpful. Will get back to it later this week, right after I drop of that application to do a degree in visual art (yep, really!). 

Roses winter 2015

Presenting my new garden space! We have moved the chickens behind the shed and removed their old coop. 

Doesn't look like much now, but just wait and see...

Planning too many roses (however do you cut down the wish list?!) I have 14 noted for this space, plus lots of salvias, agastache, nepeta and buddleia (mostly small varieties), two dwarf fruit trees (apples? Pears?) and an inbuilt chair for sitting and thinking (preferably with a notepad, pencil, and bottle of cider). The space is about 4m x 4m square. Seems tiny, but I am a mistress at squeezing lots of plants in, and it's still bigger than done people's courtyards. 

Score!

Two dollar clearance rose standard #2 turns out to be pink, and a nice clear pink at that. Almost no scent at all though. Is it 'Bonica'?

And, in other news, my boy built me a big A-frame trellis out of old recycled timber we've had lying around since we started renovating this place years ago. It literally took him ten minutes, and already looks like it's been there for years. 

Broadly speaking, the round section of this bed features a 'Crimson Baby' nectarine, under planted (left to right) with Nepeta 'Walkers Low,' chocolate cosmos, common thyme, Salvia nemorosa 'Lubecca' and 'Tanzarin,' Pelargonium sidioides (?) and a dwarf buddleia. 

Along the shed, mostly invisible at this stage, is rose 'Red Pierre' (at front corner), a few French roses including Dan Poncet, Paule Bocuse (both Guillot), heritage roses Devoniensis, White Wings and Gruss an Aachen, and at the far back by the shed is the climbing rose 'Black Boy.' On the new trellis is a grape, but i forget which and it's not had fruit yet anyway. Also jammed in here are another dwarf buddleia, a couple of correas, Goodia medicagiana, native indigo (name escapes me), Salvia petrovskia being completely hopeless, sweet marjoram (pretty but I can't stand the smell), Aquiligia 'Black Barlow' and even a few black hollyhocks. Wow, that's kind of a lot!

THEN, by the water tank, raspberries which fruit prolifically (taken from MIL's garden so variety unknown), 'purple' raspberries, the purple flowered shrub is Alyogyne 'Double Delight,' and it's next to the local Bursaria spinosa. On the tank itself is a banana passionfruit, and the rose 'Summer Song' and just out of shot on the right is a dwarf peach, 'Golden Queen.'  

Inspired

A visit to an open garden today in Mylor, SA. Layers of roses, poppies, and other flowers. Just amazing, an inspiration! Now all I need is a few extra 1000 square meters of garden...

Golden Celebration

Well, the unexpected 37c October day did frizzle the first flowers on a few roses, but to make up for it my Golden Celebration (David Austin) has really gone to town with the blooms this year! Better late than ever, it had always been somewhat lacklustre before. This is one of the roses i experimentally 'self-pegged' and looks like this was a complete success. I'm super happy with it at the moment! 

[close up]

[effect of pegging the plant]

[GC is still small compared to the surrounding Icebergs, but covered in lovely flowers. Austrostipa mollis grass makes a fabulous airy tall background in the end of day light]

Almost there

After this lot, the lawn will be 3/4 finished... It is the project which Never Ends. 

A half-finished corner

A day spent digging, until the weather came in, at least. Doesn't look at all spectacular, and the lawn is a little worse-for-wear (since it's had half a tonne of soil and rocks on it for the past six months), but very happy to have that little white cherry tree (centre) in place at last.

For those playing at home, that assortment of twigs and trees from left to right is (not including the trees right along the fence): the grafted weeping mulberry, dwarf white cherry, thornless lemon (at back), my beloved Moorpark apricot (largest), and the dwarf black cherry (far right).

Underneath so far, and so small most are almost invisible, are a couple of volunteer broad beans, three Salvia leucantha, two Penstemons (I think "blackbird" possibly, cuttings from an unknown variety in my mother-in-law's garden), one surviving peony (forget which), "Munstead Wood" David Austin rose, a prostrate caper, some Gaura from self-sown seedlings transplanted from the front garden, "Sandford" raspberry, and far too many Oxalis pes-caprae (Sour Sobs) that I just can't seem to stamp out. That seems like a lot, now that I make a list, but there is more depth to this area than appears in this 'in-progress' shot. And, let's face it, I tend to over-plant. 

From Saturday, there'll be a couple more plants in here because it's ROSES COLLECTION DAY! Wheee! 

Yesterday's inspiration

From 'A Prickly Pair' garden in Linden Park, South Australia (lovely lovely, well worth a visit if you ever have the opportunity, no web link unfortunately).

Creeping thyme and stepping stones:

Front path a masterpiece in recycling.

I haven't shown you any renovation pictures in eons, so will skip a discussion of growing eggplant from seed (or rather, a series of complaints about growing eggplant from seed) to show you our front path instead. It's only halfway through, but taking shape beautifully, and so far we've not spent a single cent on it. Bonus!

It starts here: with the porch. Pity I forgot to take a 'before' photo, but never mind. Why demolish the porch? Because it was broken and cracking, and right up against the old weatherboard, which was rotting. As the porch was peeled away, it became clear that the whole thing was damp and pretty terrible for airflow and general building health, so off it goes. We'll replace it with a little deck, we think. And I'm keeping the old iron scroll work pillars, because I like them.

Under those layers of tan-brown tiles, and rusty red stained concrete, there was sand and rock, and lots and lots of it.

 FIL had a flash of inspiration. A while ago, I'd mentioned just chucking a whole heap of paving sand around the 'pavers' I'd salvaged from when we demolished the back patio and have been using as stepping stones to the front gate. FIL thought he could dig up all the sand from the front porch (since he was going to anyway) and use that instead. Brilliant! The garden edging down the left of the path is old hardwood beams we had (although if they're old ones from our house, or ones the neighbour gave us, I can't remember).

 

Right down the back of  the path, behind FIL in this photo, is our new gate, which D has been building in dribs and drabs over the last few weeks to help make our yard a little more toddler-safe. Our gate is actually our old back door, with a recycled hardwood architrave. I think I'll paint it pillar-box red, or yellow. I like yellow, at the moment. We've put a little trellis to the right-hand side to climb plants up and over this space (I have planted roses, the native 'wisteria' Hardenbergia violacea 'Rosea,' and native clematis, Clematis microphylla). For the gardeners, other plants I have in this space - though barely visible at this stage - include the natives Plectranthus argentatus, Plectranthus  parvifolius, Hibbertia aspera, Guichenotia macrantha, and Goodenia amplexans. I've also got lemon balm and nasturtiums in here. This scrap of garden is probably the most challenging spot I've come across so far: it's quite shady, narrow, and not just dry but actually water-repellent. So far I've added loads of compost, manure, and clay to address the issues faced here.

And just for fun, here's a happy snap of the other half of the front garden which I took tonight at my favourite time of day: when the sun is getting low in the sky and shines though my Poas, which swish and shimmy in the breeze. All those roses are going to explode into flower in just a couple of weeks. Last year this happened in November, but some of the buds are splitting open already so I think they might bloom early this year.

Sort of, kind of, done...

The backyard garden plan, that is. It's not exactly a fabulous work of art - I always get carried away with colour - but I'm happy with it. I particularly like my 'North' symbol. I've never attempted any kind of hand lettering before, and I think I need to work out the best kind of pen to do it with, but it's not so bad. It's a thoroughly dodgy photo, I couldn't get it lined up properly so opted to not line it up at all :S And now that I've uploaded it, I've realised I still haven't penned in the names of the top plum (actually two plums!), nor the grape I've just planted along the eastern fence by the house. Still, enough self-deprecation, it's not bad, and if it ever ends up on my wall I'll take a proper picture then. By the way, the size of the trees etc is how I see them in about five or more years, not as they are now. Indeed, only about 85% of them are actually planted!