It's winter and time to play around with garden ideas and planning and design.
My next endeavour is to shape the entrance to the backyard with some plantings between the garage and the house with a low groundcovers and maybe lavender. There's a paved walkway between the house and garage and as you enter the backyard. I reckon lambs ears would do well there, and there would be less for Dad to mow. There's also a Japanese maple beside the verandah and I've put some pots of succulents beside the path. Maybe it could be Japanese theme with low mounds of scleranthus and mondo again? It will have to be soft planting not anything spiky or too big.
Margaret invited me over to her place for a cuppa and I came away with a hydrangea and some succulents. So here I go back to the garden to find places to plant them again. She's now got a table and shelves full of succulents to play with and has become a sunshine and succulent fan.
Succulents are perfect for those sunny dry, hard to plant places under the eaves of the house and they do especially well in pots. I was thinking of Margarets' garden spaces and if I were to put my designer hat on I would have an espalier fruit tree against her brick wall, or perhaps a grapevine, and at it's feet alyssum and thyme, or perhaps a chamomile lawn, which she wouldn't have to mow. Because the rest of her section is completely flat, if she invested in one of those robo mowers it could do the job for her and she wouldn't have to bend or push anything.
Over her defunct clothesline I would plant that wisteria and have it trailing down like laundry. I would remove the dying griselinas and plant South African bulbs and carnations in her sunny raised garden instead. On the fence I would put wires up and have star jasmine covering that wall or ivy geranium. On her bottlebrush tree I would place hanging baskets and put orchids or broms there.
Of course I don't have a magic wand to wave that this would all happen, nor am I the type of person who goes into a house and starts rearranging the furniture uninvited, but..the possibilities! (Actually, maybe I am the type of person itching to have a home of my own to decorate, but alas, I am not wealthy enough for that, maybe it's the nesting instinct, or some librarian gene that requires me to put books in the right order when confronted with a pile). But all I really am doing is placing plants in their right spaces. Which is what a gardener does to create a garden.
There is actually a video game called Sims 4 Garden. You have all these plants and presented with a plot of land to place them all in. But you must do it before they die on you or get eaten by bugs. And if you place them in the wrong place, they will die but in the right place they will thrive. You must also arm yourself with secateurs and pruners before they get out of hand and take over. Oh and weeds will pop up now and again so you have to vigilant at pulling them out.
However I wonder if people that play this game actually garden in real life, just as the people that play Grand Theft Auto go round racing and stealing cars, and the people that play Halo go round with a semi automatics shooting anyone's heads off that they suspect are aliens.
Well to all you gamers out there I AM playing the real life version. Level one might start off with herbs in pots and then you graduate to annuals and veges, then trees and shrubs and grander estates. The champion level would be official caretaker or Kaitaiki to an entire garden community. You are nominated Master Gardener to his or her Majesty and awarded an OBE.
I do know that Pu Yi the Emperor of China abdicated and became a gardener, so the top job must have not been a bed of roses compared to actually looking after a bed of roses. I was never very good at Farmville or those games that were about cooking were you pretended you were cooking by pushing and clicking all these buttons but never got to eat the food you created afterward, because it was all on the screen and you'd spent all your time and money playing a video game with no reward other than it took hours and hours of your free time. Much like writing a gardening blog.....
