The great weed whacking

We have begun the marathon renovation.  I can feel it in my bones all achy breaky today after a long Sunday morning session with the new mattock. I managed about four hours of work before the males in the house stirred.







Two panadol osteo and nothing can stop me!

 Chris, our Mr Maps, has gone visiting friends interstate, as one does when retired, so we are proceeding without the benefit (yet) of his wonderfully detailed drawings and the consultant who was going to work with them. I just hope we don't do anything too destructive along the way. Manuela's garden design workshop is in March and I think it will be a great help to me. I have to miss one Saturday to sing alto in the Marrickville Messiah...big tug of love to choose between gardens and baroque choirs.

Russ, a young, strong Canadian, has been "weed whacking" for about 20 hours over the last fortnight and the transformation is amazing. We have a field and the alpacas and geese have visited it and shown their appreciation by foraging and grazing.

 Linda, who I hope will be our regular gardener, has retrieved the ornamental beds on the side, Peter  has slashed and mown the entrance, and I have pulled out metres of wire, star posts, tyres, 44 gallon drums,old timbers and bits of iron. Our big son Ben and his two mates moved the iron bath to the Rust Gallery. Gardens this size require the love of many over time.

Love these sustainable recycled fences

When Chris comes back nothing will be quite where it was previously. The old veggie garden is demolished apart from one massive rhubarb whose lovely fruit we enjoyed in a pie last night. The earth is deep and black - I planted two roses at the front of the house straight into this deep, crumbly earth, and I could easily plant an entire hedge of shrubs at the back of the house  without calling in the topsoil and fertilisers. This is the result of 100 years of continuous market gardening. In England the gardening books always say: "Cultivate to a depth of 2 feet." Such as thing owuld normally be impossible in most of Australia. But here, I can cultuvate to a depth of 1 foot. In the veggie bed there were potatoes, which we dug up and eat, some strawberries which the birds had already nibbled away, but not much else. It is in the wrong place, partly shaded by some young elms.

With the weeds suitably whacked there is a feeling of open space, and so every day my vision for the place seems to change. There is more room than I imagined, less slope, fewer obstacles. There is room for a rose garden and a great sweep of autumn and winter flowering shrubs. Some parts of the garden are so beautifully old fashioned that I just want to preserve their health.

But some of it is just too abundant. I am now waiting for the bob cat to come and lift huge clumps of agapanthus and kniphofia. I will replant them in slimmer rows, but there will be hundreds to spare. I put an advertisement in the university e-zine to see whether anyone was interested in having these plants. I got plenty of replies from people anxious to join me with their spades and trailers.

People do like agapanthus even if in some places they are regarded as weeds. Those beautiful bobbing heads in shades of blue and white throughout the summer are a real sign of the Christmas and New Year season in Australia. Mine are still blooming and we're halfway through February.

I know I am just a caretaker of this garden. Until I left my last garden behind I didn't quite realise that a garden is like any other creative thing, designed to be given away. I can look back and think, I planted that, I nurtured those, and they are still giving pleasure. I can look back over several gardens, each a little bit better than the last, because I've been learning along the way.

I think it is significant that humanity's earliest recorded existence was in a garden.

The iron bath retrieved from a sea of weeds with the derelict school in the background. The bath has gone to our Rust Gallery and if it doesn't hold water for the animals...probably its original role in the garden.....it will become host to some flowers.

The weeds here were waist high until Russ came in with the weed whacker