60. Mid Summer Garden Tour
“If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.”
June 2021: this seems like a good time to give a guided tour of the walled garden. It is mid summer, and two years since I first started the stage by stage planting: first the kitchen garden, then the fruit trees, the hedges and screening, the geodesic domes, the proteas, the rose bed, the herb garden ………. Planting it up is a gradual process that will take another few years to complete, and with all the creative pleasure that brings.
(Health warning: do be careful not to crick your neck as the videos move from portrait to landscape views. I’m still learning how to do it!)
A panorama tour of the space, June 2021
2. Planting along the sunny west facing wall of the garden: fan trained and cordon fruit trees, flagpole cherries, climbing roses, japonicas and bush roses.
3. The herb garden planted earlier this year. Note the large fig tree fan trained along the back wall - it was transplanted from the London garden last year, and I thought we had lost it before it burst back into life late last summer.
4. The fruit dome: a collection of young fruit trees, mostly on dwarf root stocks, growing in pots until the studio building work is done. There is a pear, a damson, an apricot, a plum, a medlar, blueberries, Chilean guavas, blackberries and mulberries. Once the building work is done they will all be planted out to create a small orchard at that end of the garden.
5. The viola patch: a quiet, shady corner of the garden, planted to keep the weeds down.
6. The Protea collection: proteas (sugar bush), leucospermum (pin cushion), leucodendrum (cone bush), telopea (waratah) and banksia.
7. Potatoes and Tomatoes: planted in pots with varying degrees of success.
8. The Kitchen Garden: progress on planting in the raised beds this season. Everything is slower than usual, but coming along.
“Gardening is how I relax. It’s another form of creating and playing with colours.”