In the spirit of bloom day (read more) heres some photos:
Hebe Abbey Rose
Correa glabra x decumbens
Acacia
Correa Glabra
Dietes Iridioides
There are also a couple of the Grevilleas with small flowers and some big red Pelagoniums near the washing line. But I don't have any photos of these yet. The last two photos were taken awhile ago. But the Dietes (there are three of these in total) bloomed again on the and the Correa Glabra never stopped flowering .
I have just removed a climber from the fence outside our bedroom. It's been unwell for a while. But the drought was really the last straw. I would have liked to leave it a bit longer as it provides shade to our room through the worst of the summer heat. But it was so dead it was a fire risk.
I'm unsure what to do here. I'm considering mirroring the shading on the other side of the house which has parallel beams of wood and trellis. With the trellis a climber would have a proper support and the area would be quite shady while the climber grew. But the problem is finding a climber that will working in a small area with little shade or water.
Most nights we get a nocturnal visitor. Usually we hear the possum bouncing across our roof at high speed just after we turn out the lights. But if we keep an eye out we often see the possum scrounging for food while the lights are still on. The other night I got a photo. The first photo is the view from the lounge that you may see while waiting for the possum. The second is the possum in one of the trees.
A couple of photos of the view from our lounge:
Cropped by layout. Click to view from Flickr
The poisoned chalice has been passed to me; I have been tagged Colin & Carol of Mediterranean Garden Spain. So here I go with 5 things you probably don't know about me:
So now it's my turn to tag someone : Pam of Digging
I have finally arrived at the last posting on our front yard makeover. This post is about a thin triangular bed that is edged by the front path, the garage and the front wall. The front wall has a single window facing onto this bed from the front lounge. The window makes this an important bed despite it's size. The front lounge is where we often sit to read and unwind or to have a cuppa with visitors. We usually call it the quiet lounge as the television is down the other end of the house.
When we bought the house this bed had six iceberg roses and a bunch of annuals (a fairly standard makeover when you're planning on selling a house). Anyway the roses remain and consequently we call this the rose bed. We eventually replaced the annuals with lavender and gauri. But it had become rather overgrown from neglect.
For some reason this bed was never included in the gardens irrigation system. Probably because the front path was in before they realised there was a problem. At some point in the past an attempt was made to fix this oversight by running some pipe from the end of one of the beds over the path. To stop visitors from tripping over this pipe it was mortared into one of the path joints (which limited them to the smallest avilable tubing ; 6mm ?). This pipe was too small to be really useful. But that didn't matter as it inevitably became blocked. One of the lawn sprinklers was close enough to path that it actually watered this bed. That is right up until the day that water restrictions stopped us from watering the lawn.
The solution was to run the irrigation tubing to this bed. When I replaced most of the lawn with a new garden bed I removed the lawn sprinklers and was then able to run tubing to the rose bed. The biggest problem with this was getting the tubing under the path. I had to dig a hole under the path (about 1 metre) big enough to get the pipe through. This turned out to be a nasty job taking far too many hours. The main problem being that there wasn't enough room to use a shovel between the garage and path.
We have left the roses and added three quite distinct hebe's. But this is just a beginning and we are considering our options for the edge. We will have some time to ponder this as we don't plan to do any further planting until the water restrictions ease or the weather cools.
Alongside setting up the new lawn bed there are two other beds in the front yard that needed attention. The bed I want to mention today is one that edges the front lawn on three sides. The other is the rose bed which I'll look at next week.
All of this edge bed was peppered with weeds. But that was easily sorted with a good dig over and some mulch. There was also a dead plum tree on one side that needed to be dug out. But the real problem was the front boundary. This area was originally hedged with seaside daisies. We'd always planned to remove these daisies as soon as we came up with a better idea. But here we are five years later with the drought forcing the issue. Nothing seems to kill seaside daisies. But that doesn't mean they look good.
One plant that has been a great success in the back yard is Dietes Iridiodes. These are South African plants which seem well suited to our dry climate. They have long strap like leaves and spectacular iris like (hence Iridiodes) flowers. We have been growing these in isolation in the backyard. But the idea is that they will look great planted in a group. They are certainly hardy. In the last four months they have flourished despite the drought. We do give them a fortnightly slosh of greywater but they've never looked like they needed it. I shall keep you posted on their progress.
