My gardens ( 4 )

My gardens ( 4 )

Posted on 27 Aug, 2008 6 comments

There comes a time in everyone’s life when one is slowing down; some call it retiring. Well, at one stage we did semi retire. We sold the orchard and kept 32 acres of land with the house and one of the dams. We planted the vineyard, which was more to keep us outof boredom, but ended up being a winner and selling wine. After 5 years we decided to call it a day. The sad bit is that a farmer lives off the land, once you cannot work the land anymore you have to leave the land. We could not have simply let it all rot away, it was worth money and we needed money to retire. So, since our son had long lost interest in ever becoming a grower, we just called it quits. So you see, it was a neccessaty to leave this place and head for somewhere else. We always loved the tropics, as we had been there many times. One of our daughters lived in Darwin and we had visited her several times. So that’s how come we ended up leaving the farm and driving 2400 kms with our dogs in the car to the Northern Territory. One day I will write about the trip, so you can all imagine what the place looks like from a floral point of view of course. We had bought 5 acres in Darwin. On it was a small house with a huge garden. The garden was what appealed to us most of all.
Here I was again unpacking, this time not minding the baby but the dogs, one of which was pretty old and deaf. Hubby’s first job was to fence off the block. 1/3 we left as it was, virgin bushland, but 2/3 was dog proof fenced off. There were at least one hundred palm trees, the endemic Livistonia humilis, the Roystonea regia ( Cuban Royal Palm ), Dypsis lutescens ( Golden cane palms – clumping ), Caryota rumphiana ( Fishtail palm – clumping ), Ptychosperma macarthurii ( Macarthur palm – clumping ), Pritchardia pacifica ( Fijian fan palm ), Neodypsis dicaryi ( Triangular Madagascar palm ), many of the same species, there was a Schleffera actinophylla ( Umbrella tree ), lots of Eucalyptus miniata ( Woollybutt ), green cordylines, Delennia alata’s, weeping rosewood trees, African Mahogany trees.
The house was 50 m from the road and you couldn’t see it when going through the gates. A gravelly path lead to the garage. On either side of that path were native trees and shrubs, all left to nature. Not until the final sway in the track you would see this green oasis, thick buffalo like grass, in which huge beds were with palms, ferns, hibiscusses, Ixoria’s, hedges of them as well, cordylines, monsteria’s, frangi pani’s, and lots of philodendron vines, twirling and twining against the rough barks of the native Eucalyptus trees and the smooth ones of the palms. The house had a veranda on 4 sides of it and where ever you walked you had a lovely view. The veranda was higher than the lawns, you had a couple of steps to go down to it. Between the lawns and the veranda was a kind of wall from gravel stones or boulders if you like, some of which would have been impossible to lift just like that, and it was filled in with pebbles. “Why pebbles?”, I would ask myself. I soon discovered we had no gutters. They would have been absolutely useless as when it rains it only pours and they would overflow just the same. So now in the wet season, those tropical downpours would just be running down like waterfalls of the currogated iron roof, then into the pebbles, not destroying the lawns. We arrived in November and early December the fence was ready, the pool was ready before Xmas and I had made several dashes to the most wonderful nursery, which was only 5 kms down the road, to buy even more plants! I needed those as I had plans for another bed, which I would make around some other native trees which were close to each other, some Malaleuca leucodendron and something I forgot its name, lol. This bed would also serve as a buffer zone for the neighbours.
By no means is this chapter finished, so I will say: to be continued. Otherwise you good people will get no time to see photo’s and read other blogs.

More blog posts by Marguerite