I want to talk about my garden

I want to talk about my garden. It might be a little boring perhaps to read a description of my gardens but gardening has been preoccupying me somewhat lately and I thought that a good place to start is to set out what garden I actually have.

When I think about my house there are, I think, four distinct areas of garden.

The first is the front garden.

Given the era that Aidanvale was built in, the house is situated quite close to the footpath. There isn’t a front yard to speak of. Instead there are four garden beds. There are two garden beds on the left and two on the right with a footpath and stairs up to the front door going through the middle. The front garden beds are at footpath level and the back garden beds are slightly raised with a little rock retaining wall.

The second is the herb garden out the side of my house.

The herb garden before we moved in made some changes. I'll get an updated photo soon

It is set into a raised concrete wall that encloses the little courtyard off my kitchen. Rafael loves to use the wall around the herb garden as his racing track and race his cars round and round. We have a few herbs growing in it at the moment. There was a lovely big rosemary bush but now, sadly, it is a little scraggly rosemary bush after my husband took to it with gusto with some pruning shears. We also have some mint, perennial basil, sage and thyme. There were two large vines that were growing up a trellis but we have started removing them and are trying to cultivate a passionfruit vine there instead. There are also a couple of little lavender bushes. They are very small and most of the year they look very sad. When they do flower in spring they look lovely.  There’s also a largish space that at the moment isn’t growing anything. An enormous oregano plant had taken over almost an entire side of the herb garden but we took it out and haven’t as yet replaced it with anything. We’ll get around to it. 

The third little garden is what I think of as my shade garden.

At the back of the house, right off the family room is another court yard. It is has the garage on one side of it, and then a beautiful sandstone wall separating the courtyard from the grassy backyard beyond. Built into the sandstone wall is a water feature with two inbuilt garden beds on either side. To the left, along the fence, is a large garden bed that receives almost no sun whatsoever. It is shaded by large trees and a beautiful star jasmine vine that trails over a pagoda like structure. At the moment it has a beautiful camellia tree growing in it, some ferns and some dianella, an interesting Australian native. We haven’t touched this garden since we moved in and it’s still thriving. There are definitely more weeds poking through but the ground cover seems to keep them mostly in check.

Finally (and I have been dreading writing about this one) we have the back yard. 

Here is our little Ninja Turtle in the backyard, sitting in a hole - before we let it get out of control

As in, the grassed area at the very rear of our property. There are garden beds around most of it. When I say garden beds, I mean weed beds. We haven’t done any gardening out there for months. The grass is at waist height. Literally. Some of the weeds are actually even taller. The vines haven’t been trimmed and are growing out into the middle of the yard.

When I think of that back yard I am thoroughly ashamed of myself and so I try not to think about it much. I certainly try to avoid going out there. It’s a shame because that’s where the clothes line is. I have actually taken to hanging the clothes on clothes horses in the family room just to avoid having to go out into the backyard. That makes me even more ashamed of myself. It’s a cycle that I can’t seem to break because we have let it get so wild it just seems too hard to start trying to fix it.

I did warn people in an earlier post that my thumb is generally the opposite of green and the backyard definitely goes to prove that point.

No. I am being too kind to myself.

What that backyard proves is just how lazy I really am.

Although tackling the backyard still just seems like too big a job for me right now, I am making an effort to improve the front garden beds and the herb garden. They are my current projects and I will share more about them in future posts.