"HC" wrote in message
...
G'day Kylie

While my yard had the basic landscaping done when I bought the house, I
did pull lots of stuff out.......eg, LARGE quantities of Dietes which took
over during the second year (back when it used to rain heaps)!! I keep a
clump of these in a pot these days in order to keep them under control.

i just read clive blazey's "the australian flower garden" and boy, does the
"suburban garden" come in for a serve!! he's an old cross-patch sometimes
:-) chez-moi, i think i am trying to do more or less what you are - unless
there's something particularly loathesome or wrong about soemthing, i'd
truly rather keep it & work around it. but that seems to be the limit of my
original design ideas g. i do think though that more ideas will come with
time.

What I could see though, was that the landscapers had a basic colour
scheme so I decided to go with this...it also matches the house colours
and is quite a feat at times to find plants in a particular colour, being
burgundy, pink and cream/white.

i just got a "burgundy lace" ajuga!! (i love ajuga. i don't really know
why).

I quite like the challenge of
finding plants in these colours, it's something I haven't done in previous
gardens.

as my place is a peeling cream-painted shed, i can do anything with
colours... and there are so many beds each could have a theme. this is what
i would like to do. i had a really nifty colour idea (a black garden bed)
but then couldn't fathom where to put it. nor, beyond two things i could
think of, what to put in it :-) sadly, i messed up my theme beds (even
though there's only 3 tiny ones) already because when we first got here in
spring i put nasturtiums everywhere as it was just so bare, & now i'm hoping
some self-seed but hope others don't, as they are now the "wrong" colour now
i've thought about it more. argh!

I don't have a 'grand plan' as such and just make changes as I think of
new ideas or see something in a magazine or on TV that I think might suit,
but having said that I did put a lot of thought into a couple of trees
that could be planted, in my now, small back yard. Previous gardens have
been several acres so I used to plant what I liked

mine is the several-acres variety, and yet we've already managed to make a
couple of mistakes with tree location. i shall have to relocate them before
they get too much bigger. i need to put more thought into this!!!

, found
at a special price or were given by other gardeners whose trees/shrubs
became too large for their space and needed to be moved to a new location.
One of these was a 'very' large cactus collection, with some being 2
metres tall and with several trunks. An extremely dry area, where nothing
else would grow, was just perfect and they looked right at home.

lovely! this is what i meant. i need to be able to "see" where different
types of things will be good but i can't seem to do it. hence even though i
want big "garden rooms" one day, i am alarmed at the thought of just making
a humungous mess by doing things thoughtlessly. perhaps i need to read more.

thanks for your thoughts, bronwyn!
kylie