We finally got around to replacing the predecessor of this thing - name temporarily absent from brain (well, I hope it's temporary) - which was the Australian version, and never recovered from the 45 degree New Year's Day of about 5 years ago. This is the South African, or South American, equivalent. It has curly leaves. We haven't used the black irrigation pipe since the water restrictions a couple of years ago; I imagine it's been colonised by ants, and is now completely non-functional as water transport. I probably should remove it. Easier to replace it than fix it, I expect.
The tree fern here planted itself and is now, some years on, at a height which makes this courtyard naturally shaded. Behind it is the water feature, and the other big tree fern. The 3rd, which is a Dixonia to these two's Cooperii (if I have that around the right way) is not so spectacular. Very understated, but it gets hardly any light or water.
The camellia is increasingly out-of-place, in terms of origins, but it's leaves really glory in the strong light. Aesthetically speaking, it's quite pleasing. Well, shiny, anyway. It collaborates nicely with the dappling initiated by the tree fern above.
Looking back towards the previous 2 pictures - my original water feature, the vertical pipe, still holding its own as a feature, although it doesn't have much to do with water any more. The ivy is a curse and this will have to be its last summer. We now have plenty of space filling local greenery - to wit, the swordfish fern you can see here, so the ivy is not required. We originally had a trellis roof over this area, but it collapsed due to engineering deficiencies, and it's only in the last year or so that the 2 tree ferns have replicated it's shade giving effectiveness. Consequently, we're starting to rebuild the bromeliad garden.
This is the site of the major works; the golden melaleuca has been hacked back to pretty much a stump - it's just started to sprout again. It had got to be a monster, plus it was pretty leggy, so I pruned it. Likewise the grevillea, on which I left one flowering branch, has been savagely cut back. Not that that seems to have disturbed it much; within days new growth was sprouting all over the stump. As a bit of a downside, the view through to the junk area has been opened up, but it's really an old problems, since we decided not to put in a garage.
What we want to do with this bed now is plant a lot of small flowering plants, because the upper storey on the other side of the garden is so well established now.
We've started off with these two yellow flowering things - one is an everlasting - and we're going to try and keep the sun vine under control. It had pretty much colonised the melaleuca, but it makes a feral ground cover as well if there are no trees. Plus, in the bottom right, you can see another plant, which is in fact a Marrickville indigene, threatening to fill up the bed. This will be the second completely different self seeding ground cover to turn up in this section of the garden, and it hasn't wasted much time in replacing the dampieria.
As you can see, losing the melaleuca and grevillea hasn't made a huge impact on the overall effect of the view from the upstairs window. On the right you can see the tree fern(s) and our eucalypt, but all the
trees on the left are borrowed.
There's a lot of work to do to make all this work, but I think it will be quite good. The biggest problem is that the last couple of years we've been slack with weekly maintenance, so there's a lot of weeding, pruning and miscellaneous small jobs to do. At the moment I'm putting out a green bin every two weeks which is completely full, and still losing ground.
I think I'll probably need a skip before I'm finished.
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