My writing friend Beth came and gave me some more manuka, a succulent and showed me how to propagate maidenhair ferns. They are really tiny and fragile and need tweezers and a sharp knife to tease them out. I will need to pot them up as they have a habit of clumping and need to spread out.
My garden bounty hasn't really yielded enough to give away yet, although Mum harvested some spinach looking leaves for dinner which tasted extremely salty and turned to green sludge. I think she got the wrong plant. We might have been eating flowers.
I am going to have to buy more netting and thoroughly cordon off the flowerbed and garlic from the chickens. They also got through to Fluffy's garden and destroyed her Queen Anne's Lace, uprooting the lilies as they went. I fear they may get their claws into the Jacaranda, I'm worried the leaves won't turn out and it will stay looking like a dormant stick. I saw this lovely white Clematis at Kings the other day, very tempted to buy it, it's native, but the price tag was $35, like the poor knights lily...should I be paying that much for one plant? Mum gave me grief over buying the Frangipani, and that was about $60, discounted.
I moved the hibiscus which was sited on the north facing fence to the rock garden outside my bedroom window. So there's two hibiscus side by side now, they can grow a small hedge. It wasn't really doing well by the fence as was in a kind of wind tunnel and the chickens kept scratching out the bark mulch.
Now reading Alan Titchmarsh's Garden Year which is a collection of his writings in Gardener's World magazine. I like to read about the goings on in English gardens. I am also, concurrently reading Changing Lives which is about two friends who wrote each other about their gardens in NZ but now are have sold their properties and moving to new places.
It made me think would I ever leave this place...where I'm putting down roots, not that theres much roots yet but it hasn't even been a year. In the forseeable future, unless a dream job comes up or a dream Prince comes along..not likely. I need land. Earth. Soil.
Gerald O'Hara's words come to mind from Gone with the Wind. Why land is the only thing in the world worth workin' for, worth fightin' for, worth dyin' for, because it's the only thing that lasts. Oh it will come to you this love of the land. There's no getting away from it...and I'm not even Irish.
