Spring in My New Home

This winter I had to move houses and leave behind the slightly wild garden that I had.

Garden in the Old House

The joys of that winter garden can be viewed with pictures at ‘Winter in My Garden’. In that home the spring continued to have the nasturtiums, morning glory, roses, daffs and snowdrops but brought in new flowers too like the wisteria and jasmine. The perfume of those two is heady and pervades everywhere. One evening I had forgotten to shut the back door and left just the grill shut and the jasmine scent was in every room in the house. Here are some of the photos of my old garden in spring.

 

Wisteria in the back garden

 

Wisteria over the fence and neighbour's garage

 

Wisteria over the shed in the back garden

 

Jasmine in full bloom

 

Dog Rose Bush

 

Creeper Roses

 

 Old Roses with very sweet perfume

 

 

 

Hardy Thistle that grew strong every year

 

Peruvian Lilies

 

Lavender starts to bloom

 

Gardenias

 

Paperbark tree flowering

 

Flowering Palm

Garden in the New House

My new home has a better established garden and from what I gather was with one family for a few decades. Only recently has it been put out to rent and had one previous tenant besides us. It appears that they were not gardeners for most of the trees and bushes were not pruned. There is affront and back garden. The front garden has palm trees, a gum tree of sorts and an orange tree.

 

 

Front Garden

There is ornamental grass, bougainvillea with orange flowers, a small rose plant that appeared when some of the overgrown grass and weeds were pulled up and one or two other plants which have yet to be identified. I am sure as flowers come out I shall be able to search the net for its identity. These are all in front of veranda. 

Ornamental Grass

 

Orange Tree

 

Last 2 oranges of last year's harvest

 

 

 Orange Blossoms

The back garden is also large with well-established trees – variety of palms, banksia and ferns. Some of them I believe are old species – there seem to be a New Zealand Fern and a couple of Staghorn ferns.

 

Back Garden

 

 Fruiting Palms

 

 

From the neighbour's garden

 

 Banskia and Palms

 

Cones new (above) and old (below)

 

 

Banksia Flowers

 

Sweet perfum in this yet unidentified flower

 

Stand alone fern (need to find its identity)

 

Staghorn Fern on an old tree in the back garden

 

 

 Winter flowers stilll going strong

There is a well planted border running along the drive that proved even more interesting. It started with some flowers coming over from the neighbour’s side. Then there is a big bush of parrot flowers and a long thick stem of a rose that had not been cut back. On cutting down the old stems of parrot flowers we discovered that someone had tried to kill of the rose. We chopped the stem right back and hoped it would revive itself. I am glad to say that after a few weeks I have seen new leaves sprouting from this near dead plant. Next there is a plant with tiny white flowers and spiny leaves that has spread along the fence a little. A number of spider flower trees planted along the border. In between there are a couple of vines which also had not been pruned in a while. 

 

Parrot Flowers and the Rose that got sever pruning after the photo was taken

Last year's final bunch of grapes

 

 Emerging vine leaves

 

 A hard prune works wonders

 

Spider Flowers

 

There is a bush that had few leaves but many tight buds. We were not sure what to make of this one but the buds uncurled into new leaves literally within a couple of days of spring. Then new buds appeared and lovely purple flowers of all shades emerged. Now we could look up the flowers on the net to identify the plant which is from the family of nightshades. 

 

Brunfelsia Australis - nightshade

 

Further along there is a lovely cover of wild strawberries among the weeds and grasses. The strawberries are deep red and lovely to look at but watery and tasteless. There are some weeds with pretty little flowers as well.

 

 First wild Strawberry

Nosiy Miners are full of beans

Winter in my Garden

Down Under we are topsy-turvy and I still am amazed after 4 years that flowering of plants is right through the year and even at different times. Now I can hear you think, ‘they would follow your seasons… duh!’ This does not hold much water as it probably is more to do with temperatures and rainfall. So let me just start with winter – a good weather and time of year as any to start this journey in my garden.

The tree at the end of the garden with large seed pods  from one of the creepers. With so many of them about it is hard to say which one these belong to as this is the first year we have seen them.

Winter begins on 1^st of June and around that time I found some buds showing up on the daffodils and snowdrops. This is a different variety of daffs than I have seen before and must have been planted by the previous tenant. For the first year I had no leaves even to indicate there were these blubs in the ground. 

The daffodils actually show up as clusters on a single branch. 

The snowdrops are in a small patch round the back next to the water boiler and were a pleasant surprise.

We did get a few roses growing in the single bush by the kitchen window. The opening of the buds catalogued by my husband is included here.

In the front garden there is a bush / creeper. Well I was not sure what it was as it sent out these long branches that reached up to the roof pretty fast and I had to keep cutting them back. The first year there were no flowers, so I had no idea what the plant was. The next year there were one or two small yellow flowers and looked like roses. This year, after good pruning of last 3 years, there was a explosion of beautiful pale yellow almost creamy roses and it turns out to be a rose creeper that could cover the walls if I leave it to grow. But then I do not think it would flower so well.

Another surprise was the nistercium plant. There is a small plant growing next to the thorny pink rose bush and in the past I have had a few nicely orange and yellow flowers show up. But strangely this year, most likely due to large amounts of rain through summer and autumn, I believe, there has been an explosion of this plant. It had sent out creepers all around and flowered like crazy. The leaves growing large also like the lily pad leaves. 

The blue flower in here is from another plant. There was a nicely branching plant I saw at the edge of someone's garden. I picked a small branch to pot to grow this succulent type of plant and I got these pretty delicate blue flowers.

The other one that sends vines all around the garden, across the fence and on to the neighbour’s and our garage is the morning glory. 

The white flowers are fromanotehr creeper and I have yet to find out what it is!

There are also a couple of bulbs of spectacular orange-flowered amaryllid. There are some pretty delicate purple / blue flowers that I am sure are a kind of weed.

The grass is green and full of clover especially when the sun warms up the ground after heavy rains. The rain and odd hailstorm are wonderful to watch.

The winter time is when we get our harvest of limes. There tree has huge thorns and was badly in need of a prune. Having cut it back for the last 3 years we got a decent harvest of about 15 limes this year.

Finally, also this winter we discovered out resident blue tongued lizard. Seems to be living under the house and comes out to bask in the winter sunshine.