Lazy Lotus Eaters

One of the advantages of living on the mountainside in a little seaside village is that you can be a very lazy gardener and then tell yourself that you are going for the natural look. 

I strolled around the garden today to admire all the new spring flowers.

  

I was pleased to see that last year's Earthworks are slowly being camouflaged.

Daisy bushes are just so precocious, pushing everyone else out of the way but they do look stunning at this time of the year.

Clivias are such terrific plants for the spots which never see the sun. I only have one particular colour. A friend has a brother who makes a living from growing Clivias and he donated 15 precious seeds of Yellow Clivias to me which I am trying to germinate at the moment.

 

They do well in sun too. Here they were planted in a circle at the base of my old Wild Camphor tree. During this past Winter, the tree was blown down by an exceptionally strong North Westerly, which blew for an hour and then moved on. So, the circle is looking a bit spare now. Once flowering is finished, I might rearrange these as I don't plan to replace the tree. The nearby Bay Laurel tree has developed into a monster and will probably undermine any new tree's efforts.

I am rather hopeless at remembering to take "before" photographs and so you will just have to believe me when I say how unsightly and what a nuisance the sidewalk was. There are no paved sidewalks in our village. I cannot complain because we are lucky enough to live on one of the very few roads which has a meanly thin coating of tar instead of gravel. The boundaries to the roads are either left unattended or residents might choose to extend their gardening efforts to that area. In our case, it was always a problem to keep the soil on a steep gradient from blowing or washing away. Ground cover was not too successful because the area was too dry and sandy in summer and too shaded in winter. 

We were inspired to do some gardening with rocks to hold it all together. 

Doesn't this look neat?  

 

We cannot cement in permanently to keep out weeds because of underlying municipal pipes and cables. My only regret is that we did not first lay down some shadecloth or hessian below the rocks and stones to cut down on the amount of awkward weeding ahead.





 Neighbours have planted a veritable jungle along our back fence and nothing will grow there anymore because of the excessive shade in winter from our house and now, their trees. The grass gave up and died. When we recycled some old bricks to deal with this problematic messy area, we remembered to use some old hessian below the bricks to discourage the weeds. Only white sand fill between the bricks for non-permanence. I wonder whether something like Penny Royal would enjoy growing between the bricks?