My gardens ( 4 ctnd )

Posted on 28 Aug, 2008 1 comment

The nursery down the road was a great inspiration. The people there were most helpful in identifying my plants in the garden. If I didn’t bring down leaves, flowers, I would send them an email with the pictures and without fail I always got an answer. They had a lovely water feature with water lilies, lotus flowers and plants. I bought some bamboo, more crotons, gardenia’s, costus plus some marigolds, mundo grass and palms to grow along our swimming pool. We had a lot of big boulders which had come outof the ground where the pool had to go and some of them we used for a rock feature on one side of the pool, behind which we planted those palms to create some privacy. All the other rocks went to the neighbour who needed some for landscaping as they had only just moved into their new home. A machine came to pick them up, load them onto a tip truck and then 5 minutes later dump them on the other side of the fence. They were outof my hair!
In the beginning I started mowing the lawn with my Flymo, but that was such a live size job, we straight away bought a ride on mower. My hubby was happy as it was a far cry from the days he sat on the tractor on the farm. At least he had something to do again. At the same time he bought a whipper snipper, which some people call an edger. At least only once in a while I sat down on my knees cutting the edges of the lawn, where they hit the beds. I had also bought two small trees, which leaves I had immediately fallen in love with when I first spotted them in the nursery. Dark green, flat and big leaves, sitting almost horizontally. They called the tree dinner plate trees, but I have written the nursery asking for its real name. Inset: I have just had an answer from them: Polyscias scutellaria ( Dinner plate Aralia ). How’s that for service? Well, with all these new additions into the ground all I had to do is watch them grow. We had a huge amount of underground water there, 5liters per second bore. We had 6 sections of several sprinklers going alternatively and we had it all electronically organised. The only trouble was the weather. Even if the control board for the irrigation system was completely switched off and unplugged in the wet season it was still twice blown up by the lightning. As it all came from the bore, which also provided our water for the house, we sometimes had a day or more without water until we had a new control board. Those days I used to get a bucket and fill it from the tap at the tank. Once after a storm we had to bath at the swimming pool, soaping ourselves in and then bucketed pool water over us. Quite funny, really. Another pain were the bandicoots. These creatures like to knaw through black polethene irrigation pipes. Of course many pipes were right in our “jungle” and before you found where the holes were you had to wade yourself through the palms, shrubs, lantana’s, cordylines and ferns. Then hubby had to put in connectors after cutting the damaged piece out. I checked all irrigation regularly, pulled up the pipes which were lying on the ground, but were covered by leaves, mulch and overgrown by ferns and vines. I sometimes had to cut roots away to free up the pipes. This was because the previous owners had more or less neglected the place a bit. The little bandicoots also had a bad habit of digging holes in the garden, and they loved the lawns. So often I found myself filling them in again. When we first got there, there was a mango tree. It looked healthy, but one day it had lost a whole section and we discovered white ants had eaten away the inside of the trunk. Bad luck, so out it went. We still had banana trees left, but whenever there were bananas on them, the fruitbats got them before we did. So then we picked the stalk with bananas and hung it on the veranda beam, waiting for it to ripen. But it never happened, they just rotted away green! We had no luck with the fruit there. But mangoes came free anyway. Each spring, around the end of November they were ripening up all around us. Many people had mango orchards. Some were even neglected and along the lagoon where we walked the dogs mango trees were growing in neglected orchards and branches haning over the fence. So we took plastic bags and just picked them. There are several species around there, one is purpely and tastes sooo good. Rambutans also grew in that area and they ripened early December. These we bought. Apart from some green and brown tree snakes, the innocent types, we only twice had an encounter with a snake. One I didn’t see, but hubby, who every night walked around the property with the dogs and a torch saw it. He said he never had seen a snake that beautiful. Orange patterns on a black snake. The one I saw was that python, which had curled itself up against the water tank that evening. I have written about that fella. Not poisonous.
More tomorrow!