Memories of My Old Garden.

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I have been spending some of my holidays going through, re-organising and storing old photos when marvel of marvels I actually found some photos of my last garden which I left around 9 years ago. In those days I never purposefully took photos of my garden or its plants … so it was a joy to stumble upon some photos which included my garden.

Unfortunately though, I didn’t find any photos of the front garden except one where the garden is vaguely visible in the background. So in this blog I will have to talk about my efforts to develop the back garden.

When we moved into the house back in the late 80’s, there was not much in the way of a backyard garden. Out the back there was an enormous old poinciana – delonix regia – on one side and on the other was an enormous swimming pool surrounded by two lonely palms (which you can spot at the back of this photo),

a small sick-looking petrea volubilis and a lovely crepe myrtle bush.

Within a year I had created some garden beds around the pool and planted some young Golden Cane Palms on the other side of the pool.
This photo shows the garden bed at the back of the pool now planted with lots of ferns, an ixora and way up the back was a jasmine.

Down the side of the pool the bed was filled with crotons, hibiscus, russelia, strelitzia, another golden cane palm, lots of ferns and the singapore daisy groundcover – Sphagneticola trilobata.

Over the next few years I created more garden beds edged with large rocks under the very old, very large poinciana tree.

In the garden beds there were pentas, crotons, ferns, philodendrons, bamboo, dracaenas, acalyphas, impatiens, palms …

A few years later, at the back of the pool, the garden bed had filled out completely … you can see the large travellers palm and the green and white stripey thing (never knew the name of that!)

This photo shows the back of the pool garden bed now filled with very large ferns, lots of palms and a large strelitzia …. oh and that was our beautiful girl Ruby … she was the girl in the family!

I had also built new garden beds around the golden cane palms that were in the middle of the yard. By this time they were over 3 metres tall and around them I planted more pentas, aralias, gerberas and diffenbachias.

This was the view from the back door across the patio to the backyard. You can see all the rock edged beds under the poinciana and the new beds on the right of the photo under the golden cane palms.

This photo was taken standing in the garden beds under the golden cane palms looking back to the garden beds under the poinciana (that’s hubbie engrossed in book about life in the north!) – about 10 years after we had moved in!

We spent another 3 years enjoying the fabulous backyard garden space … and then decided to move!

• 8 Jan, 2010
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