And so ends my time gardening with Bark at the retirement villages as of last Friday - who can say they retired from a retirement village? After mowing lawns for the >100th time I decided to call it a day, lest a ponga tree fall in the fernery and I could no longer hear it due to my damaged hearing.
I'm now going to concentrate on quiet gardening in which I also wear camouflage gear so you won't even know I'm doing it. I also need to rectify the damage my brother caused to those buxus hedges which he trimmed for sure, but back to their bare bones so that their skeletons are showing through. I thought a hedge had to have leaves on it to be a hedge? And one more thing I'm mad about is, he trimmed my hardenbergia arch and left Lady bird's nest exposed so that she is no longer secure. There are dead twigs all through the arch now where he's chopped it instead of doing secateur work, for each tendril he shaved it with the power trimmers like slicing a cake. This is what I get for going away and leaving amateurs to do the job. Aiya.
I will have to tell my brother he's banned from our hedges now and I don't care if he's the one that owns the trimmer. I would gladly leave a bush untidy and the grass to grow wild if there were birds living in there because I have seen dead birds all over the ground where the grass has been mown at the church. Aside from their mower totally destroying three expensive flowering shrubs that I still have yet to replace. We are in a war, it seems, on one side the garden militant with their mowers, blowers, weedeaters and trimmers polluting the air with their toxic fumes and noise and potential threat to life and limb, and the garden peace corps with our green thumbs, seeds and flowers guerilla gardening in places where there was no garden before.
For sixteen months I had been lured to the other side recruited as a garden cadet to cut grass and pull weeds. I should have told them forget it, employ some goats instead. But I guess its all in hindsight now and I must atone for my foolishness in believing one can ever tame a garden in the flesh. It can't be done. And no amount of money or roundup will ever grow a garden in the spirit.
So it's back to the drawing board..and I mean truly back. My borders need to be expanded. So I got busy and added some more plants to New Gardenland. Bev from the Garden circle kindly offered me spanish shawl from her amazing terraced flower garden. I planted geums won in a raffle. Purple iris and geraniums from Pepper Tree Nursery. A dicentra Bleeding Hearts (one I had my on my wishlist for a few years now) from Aero Garden Centre in Thames. Margaret offered me orange succulents, sedums, and creeping jenny. Today I bought cherry tomatoes eggplants, and fragrant Cook Island ginger from the Henderson carboot sale.
Tomorrow I am going to check out the Rose Festival in Parnell, even though I have said many times I'm not that big a fan of roses...I like the flower but can't stand the thorns. But I'm sure there will be other flowers there..I'm really hanging out for the Sweet Pea Flower show in two weeks time at the Horticultural Centre in Western Springs. Unlike the NZ Garden and Flower Show at the Trust Stadium which is charging an arm and a leg - $90 a ticket last I heard, the 17th Annual Sweetpea and Flower Show is absolutely free. Bring your sweet peas!
