Restoring le jardin.

A lamish excuse for not blogging....I've been doing a spot of gardening.

I was trying to find a "before" shot of this rather awful patch of mountain jungle which I am trying to transform into its glory days. Some of the folks who have been around here for a few decades said the original owner had a wonderful garden. There seems to be a lot of gardeners around here so I'd thought i'd better do the community thing.

So anyway, here's the best photo I could find of the garden before..... it was so bad that I never took a full photo of it. It was basically a heap of rather invasive Kikyu grass, some equally as invasive Fishbone fern and some other sort of horrible tuber on some pretty poor soil. We had some rain around here, so it was the perfect opportunity to dig a lot of this crap out whilst the soil was moist and loose. I've been rather used to digging in rock hard soil the past few months.


So, when I was digging around trying to get out a largish Cypress Pine (you can see the rootball in front of the car) and replacing it with the smaller weeping Japanese Maple pictured above, I discovered an old brick path underneath about a foot of soil. Digging it out was particularly difficult, nevertheless there seemed to be a pattern there. With the rain, scooping off that top 12 inches was considerably easier although one of the previous owners (a builder) decided to bury bricks in the bloody garden. In total I've found about twenty, laid flat neatly in the soil. Anyway after digging out bricks and other assorted building site refuse, here's what I found.

So, I've thrown in some roses and bulbs and some smaller shrubs around the maple, I've also made a small rock border around the maple which looks kind of hokey at this stage. Topped the whole lot with some sugar cane mulch which smells good enough to eat. And here it is so far.

Apologies for the winter light. You can just make out the maple tree bereft of leaves near the hose. The sugar can mulch is extremely thirsty, so a good three days rain has fixed that. Notice I've also hacked back a big bunch of fishbone fern in the background. the stuff is horrible with a two inch thich mat of roots underlying the whole deal, will take a lot of digging out to bring it back to some sense of order.

I should have some more photos of le jardin come spring!

The roses list: Just Joey, Fleuro, Bettina, Blue Moon, Olympic Torch, Canary, Chrysler Imperial, Sylvia, Fragrant Plum, Chicago Peace and Pristine.