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Old 03-10-2003, 02:02 AM
Trish Brown
 
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Default Just a story... long!

I came home yesterday after spending a few days at a friends' property up near
Stroud (NSW). The garden at this place was the most spectacularly pretty I've
ever seen in a private garden (ie one that wasn't a park!), so I thought I'd
write a description of it for aus.gardeners.

The main house is about 80 metres long and for the entire length of it, there's
a narrow garden bed outlined with bushrock, all collected from the property and
hand-hewn by the owners. The plantings in this bed include a backdrop of canna
lilies (which are not a flower I've ever liked before) and hippeastrums (ditto).
On this large scale, the mass plantings look *fabulous*, though, and the cannas
are a most striking and frilly combination of deep vermilion with golden edges -
just like the skirts of flamenco dancers! The hippeastrums are a variety I've
seen around quite a bit lately - cream with reddish edges - and they contrasted
perfectly with the cannas. The whole effect of this was a riotous splash of
*RED* against the light-coloured bricks of the house. Beautiful!

Now, the house block is on about three acres of lawn. Well... grass... and this
is dotted with fruit trees: orange, lemon, lime, kaffir lime, grapefruit,
mandarin, loquat, avocado, macadamia, quince, peach etc etc etc. Each tree has
its own little rocky collar with mulch and each is supplied with its own
sprinkler spigot (water pumped up from a generous dam about 100m down the hill).
The drive that approaches the house is lined with jacarandas (hopefully, they'll
survive - for now, they look a tad moisture stressed!) and it opens out into a
huge formal portico in front of the house. The road leading to and passing in
front of the house is lined with carmine-coloured kalanchoe and interspersed
with deep claret gladioli. There's a single huge Black Boy rose in abundant
flower just opposite the front door and a knot garden further down the lawn. It
has a predictable little fountain featuring naked cherubs and arum lilies with
iceberg roses and iceland poppies. Cute!

Now, at the *rear* of the house, there are more red-foliaged plants like maranta
and caladium and philodendrum 'red wings' and that old-fashioned crinkly-leaved
thing that has long yellow flower spikes (can't for the life of me remember its
name!). All this is to encourage the frogs, y'know! And they come, too! Great
green tree frogs and big grey hoppers and those teensy weensy little bell frogs
that compact themselves into the angles of the leaves. Listening to them sing
you to sleep is one of life's pleasures, I feel... Of course, so do the owners!
LOL!

Anyway, a formal barbecue area, equipped with a rather nice rotisserie (we only
had a single chook with us, so we didn't test the rotisserie: I think they had a
body of beef in mind for that!) was pleasantly decorated with hanging pots of
the darkest (almost black) ivy-leaved geraniums, along with long troughs of deep
purple pelargoniums, all scrupulously pruned into regular shapes. The only
relief from the dark, dark purple was a smattering of blue-flowering
Streptocarpus and that was very prettily done indeed. Again, there were lots of
frogs among the geraniums and a particularly large grey one is very friendly and
allows himself to be fed fat flies by hand. He pokes his head out of his home in
a self-watering geranium pot and gobbles up whatever insects you offer him. I
enjoyed that!

Now, the kitchen garden is basically for herbs and there were italian parsley,
coriander, vietnamese mint and all the predictable herbs. The bay tree was a
nice touch, though! Behind all this, screening the view of a steep scree slope
from the house, was a wire fence laden with potato vine, passion vine and
jasmine. The scent of the jasmine was out of this world, wafting as it does into
the bedrooms, but I worry about it escaping into the bush!

At one end of the house, the owners are trying to establish another formal
European-style garden with a dead-straight planting of poplars and more rows of
cannas and hippeastrums. The idea is to establish the trees and lilies in rows
to provide shade and begin the task of breaking up the rock-hard soil, then
begin more plantings of perenials in between them, once a proper sprinkler
system has been added to the existing one. As always, all of this depends on the
reliability of the dam!

An interesting adventure happened for us when we were checking the holding tank:
an olive python had trapped itself and was hanging on for dear life to a section
of pipe inside! He couldn't go forward or back and had clearly been there for
quite a while, judging by his dulled colour and damaged scales. We were lucky
enough to be able to rescue him! My friend hooked him out on a gaff hook and I
caught him in a fishing net. Sadly, we had no camera with us, but we got a good
look at a very handsome (albeit emaciated) fellow before we released him into
the bush!

I hope this has been enjoyable to some aus.gardeners - sorry for the length, but
I wanted to share what was a lovely gardening experience for me (just as an
onlooker). ;-D

--
Trish {|:-}
Newcastle, NSW, Australia
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Old 03-10-2003, 09:43 AM
Bushy
 
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Default Just a story... long!

I like the canna's as well, but my place is 9 metres by 9 metres and made of
bush cut weatherboard....

Still, as I do a bit over time it will come up just as nice as any other
place I've seen.

Peter


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Old 04-10-2003, 03:12 PM
Chookie
 
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Default Just a story... long!

What a beautiful description -- I feel like I've been there!

--
Chookie -- Sydney, Australia
(Replace "foulspambegone" with "optushome" to reply)

"Jeez; if only those Ancient Greek storytellers had known about the astonishing
creature that is the *Usenet hydra*: you cut off one head, and *a stupider one*
grows back..." -- MJ, cam.misc
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Old 05-10-2003, 11:02 AM
A Dizzy Blonde
 
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Default Just a story... long!

Hi Trish

Thank you for that lovely story. The images your words conjure are
fantastic - and I can join you in not being a fan of canna or hippeastrum,
but the thought of a large scale planting could change my mind.

Thank you again

Joanne



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