Third Garden Post

When I hit my mid-40s I finally landed back in a house with a garden, a quite big one at that. The first years here were tentative in terms of doing much with the place as I was only renting and the back garden was a three-sided very well established courtyard (New Guinea impatiens, a Chinese silk tree, a very tall maple, a well established olive tree, a pomegranate shrub, sundry ferns and leafy things, no vegies) and the front was also well established and included a mango tree, another olive and a guava, a bottlebrush, a fat red hibiscus, a very tall black wattle, and a carpet of what used to be called Wandering Jew. Along one side there was a small weedy area where the clothes line is which featured a gnarly old frangipani, a lime tree and a spindly mandarin.  Along the other side was a mess of small shrubs and trees that formed a natural boundary with the neighbour, another frangipani, a bohinia that was busy strangling a camellia, a murraya (aka false jessamine/ mock orange). There was also another camellia in the back garden and one by the front door.

The olive trees hadn't fruited but did subsequently and I had one crop from the one in the back garden before it blew down in a high wind, and three crops from the one in the front till it just decided one day to turn up its toes and die. The guava tree gives me a good crop each year which gets made into Sri Lankan guava jelly, the pulp left over from straining the jelly being used to make guava cheese which is like quince paste. The mango makes sterling efforts each year but just doesn't get there, which is a great disappointment as that of Charlie-across-the-road groans with the buggers every year. Oh yes, there was also a fig tree in the backyard (I told you it's quite a big yard for where we live in Inner West Sydney) which didn't produce much, whereas again Charlie's did and does. And also a very large bougainvillea hedge along the back fence, and a pale cream boronia rose. The front garden has a rambling rose also.

When we undertook the inevitable Sydney Inner City renovations all yards bar the front garden were pretty well trashed, only the plants along the back fence, a jasmine creeper, and a flowering box bush surviving unscathed in the back, and the bohinia, murraya, bohinia, flowering ginger, and monstereosa making it through one side renovation, and the plants on the street side past the clothes house also happily being undisturbed. I now had (and still have) half ownership of the house (well, the BANK has most of the half, but I like to pretend I am landed), and the possibility of establishing a garden that I hoped never to have to leave till dead.

It's taken several years to get it nearly to where I just have to maintain what's there, or replace the inevitable failure-to-thrive, or dug-up-yet-again-by-the-bloody-dogs. The backyard now has a small bay bush, a kumquat (which gives me excellent crops each year and which I either pickle or eat whole in the fashion of my Sicilian sister-in-law, or give to our friend Colleen to make into jam), a lemonade tree which I turn into said cordial via a recipe from Matthew Evans which you can check out on my foodie website, a banana plant which is a rescue plant from a root stem found tossed on a footpath somewhere and which gave me my first hand of bananas this year (a ladies' fingers type, short and stubby and sweet), alpine strawberries growing in between the brick flagging in the courtyard (from a plant give to me by my dear mates from Mt Wilson who also gave me some red amaranth plants once which of course now come up every year, too), three varieties of chili (I had a lovely bush that grew to 2 metres next to the back gate till it one day passed over), and this year I have created a small bed (into which I have liberated the chilies from their former pots) and have rosemary and tomatoes in it (it's the sunniest part of the whole yard and the tomatoes are clearly happy). Apple mint also grows among the bricks, and in the raised bank in which the kumquat and bay sit I also have a cascading rosemary and a land samphire (sent to me from Victoria by George Biron, Pan bless his socks).

I had a papaw tree which delivered me a couple of fruit but it lost all its flowers this year, and lost my favour too and has been terminated. In the 'water feature' I've got two kinds of cress growing, (one of which is from a small creek/nursery run-off in Sydney Park where it grows wild and unappreciated). There's also little clumps of lemon balm here and there where the seed takes, and in a small side bed I'm growing sage, thyme, parsley, and a betel leaf vine.

Marilyn, my house partner, and I have got vegie patches down the clothes-line side now also, and we are looking forward this year to mesclun, oakleaf lettuce, cavalo nero, silver beet, broad beans, beetroot (the soil isn't fantastic for them but we do get nice baby beets and the leaves are great done as a Sri Lankan mallung), pumpkin, zucchini, more tomatoes, eggplant, choko (with which I have fallen in love, soooo adaptable!), chives, salad burnetkarawilla vines underway.

A regular feeding has given me crops of quite sweet mandarins the last two summers, and the lime tree keeps me oversupplied.

When the local Council was ripping up the concrete footpath to lay down grass we asked permission to have a garden there instead, and now we have three types of thyme, two of sage, a lemon, an avocado and a coffee tree. The latter is the third generation from one that was in the backyard before the renovations and which every year produces a crop of cheery red baubles. I collected them over the last two seasons and am planning on having a go at roasting my own beans in the next months. I just got a small kalimata olive that's covered in blossom which I hope will set. It's planted in the front where the former tree flourished. There's a growing patch of pennywort/gotukola in the front, and some in a pot in the backyard which should keep me supplied with leaves to make a mallung or to flavour rice. Oh, there is also a lemon grass in the bed with the tomatoes in the back yard, and a pot of basil. The fig tree died but Charlie-across-the-road seems to want to give me another. There is a scarily thriving curry leaf tree near the clothes line which is due for a serious cut back so the new growth can take over and perhaps be a tad more carefully managed. And finally, there are two passion fruit vines, one of which gave us fruit last year, and both of which are now in full flower.

Flowerwise, I've got ivy geraniums trailing down the fence, azaleas that do their thing in Autumn and Spring, some roses in the back, a small yellow flowered goodenia which is struggling but will make it through, the camellias remain, as does the wisteria I neglected to mention earlier from the first incarnation of the garden, there are two standardised bougainvilleas to go with the hedge at the back, the bohinia continues as does the flowering box. A stand of queen-of-the-night self-seeded near the garage, and we planted some along the side too over the grave of Short Black the cat. There are daffodil, freesia, jonquil, and autumn crocus, and some hippeastrums who had better come good this year if they want to continue in my favour. A fellow dog-walker put me on to standardised grevilleas of which there are two in the backyard which give the noisy miners in particular much pleasure. A swathe of alstromeria in the front gives pleasure unbound, and I've now got some at the back also. One year for no reason I could see New Zealand Christmas Bells appeared in the front yard and now are everywhere. I've finally got a Christmas Bush in the front yard, and there are two new frangipani, two new grevillea, a Geraldton Wax, a neem tree (I have visions of brushing my teeth with the stems), and down the side of the front is a jungle of gymea lilies (which bloomed once and never again), white bird of paradise (which a dear friend bought as a birthday present for me thinking it would remain a petite shrub but is now well and truly tree size), a bougainvillea that escaped me, and a kaffir lime tree.

All of which keeps  me kinda busy, with little time to properly maintain the murraya hedge down the street side of the front garden, nor the lillipilli near the front door which has now achieved its desire to be a rainforest specie.

A section of the old sandstone and brick low retaining wall that is our boundary to the footpath and Trafalgar Street collapsed on Monday and we will take this opportunity to completely renovate the wall. This will mean major disruption and probably loss of the red hibiscus, a lovely creeping coastal grevillea, and another low growing native whose name I have been careless enough to forget. But what opportunities it presents for some radical re-shaping of the quite lone stretch of the front!

Which brings you up-to-date on where my gardens have been and are at. This has all been by way of introducing you to what some of my future blogs will be, to wit, the garden, focusing on the fruit and veg but with the occasional breakout to coo over the flowery bits, too. Hope you enjoy them.