November in the Garden - Trisha's Meanderings
Frost — will it… won’t it…?
Well… it DID! Big time! And on my first night back at Bobundara.
I arrived home from cycling and tour guiding in France, Croatia and Morocco to find the wisteria flowering along the verandah and everything looking as though spring had truly sprung — only to wake the next morning to devastation. I’m not sure how many degrees below zero it was, but it was certainly enough to blacken not only the wisteria, but even the hardy grapevines. So many fruit and other trees lost all their leaves, and the frost zapped the iris just as they were about to flower. Their buds simply dropped over and turned to mush.
And so… it is what it is.
The really hardy ones keep flowering whatever the conditions.
What Endures
As I write, I’m looking out onto my courtyard where two huge bushes of Mme Alfred Carrière, the old-fashioned blush pink perpetual climbing rose, are in full bloom — so profusely that I’ve been able to fill the house with vases of their sweetly fragrant flowers.
The gravel courtyard is almost smothered in part by the white-flowering “snow-in-summer.” Such a great plant, with its grey foliage and spring carpet of white flowers that loves the free drainage and dry gravel.
Erigeron daisy is doing its thing, as it does most of summer — tiny white blooms filling in wherever nothing else will grow, even cracks in the cement or gravel. Any time I’ve tried transplanting it into a garden bed, it turns up its nose — it prefers tough conditions. Hurrah for that!
The snowball bush (Viburnum opulus, or Guelder rose) is in full flower, and the ubiquitous euphorbia, which many dismiss as a weed, is also at its best. It fills in every blank space in the garden — and for that, I am eternally grateful. I pull it out where it’s not wanted, but its fresh green foliage makes a wonderful filler in a dry-climate garden. Which mine most definitely is this season — desperately, hideously dry.
But again… it is what it is.
The Wild Garden
I take great joy in the parts of the garden that simply keep going. The wild garden is my constant delight. Coming back after months away means plenty of fallen sticks and branches to pick up after the winds, but once that’s done and the mower’s been over to tame the zillions of elm suckers — voilà! The most wonderful outdoor dining room I could imagine.
I so love this part of the garden, with the creek flowing through and the great shade trees making it the perfect place for long summer lunches, evening drinks, and play for children among the stick sculptures they’ve built over the years.
Borrowed Beauty
From the kitchen, the view across the creek to the paddock and the hill beyond — where cattle graze and kangaroos hop — never fails to bring joy.
Over my many years of gardening, I’ve found that it’s what lies outside the garden — the vistas, the borrowed landscape, the ever-changing cloudscapes — that gives just as much pleasure as what grows within it.
Trisha xx
