So, it seems everyone is blogging these days. I suppose it's about time I joined in.
Firstly, a bit about me. I'm a mum of two beautiful girls, aged 3 and 10 months, and also stepmother to a gorgeous 10 year old girl. Right now I'm at home full-time, but I did go back to work (in public policy research) when my first little one was about 14 months. And I guess I'll have to go back to work again sometime soon...
I live in the outer eastern suburbs of Melbourne, Victoria, on a small (450sqm) block of land, in which I'm experimenting and learning, day by day, about garden design. At the moment I'm a completely untrained amateur gardener, but as I ponder my future before rejoining the workforce after the birth of my second child, I'm giving thought to undertaking some study in landscape design and horticulture.
(As an aside: I'm a bit of a sucker for studying... which really came a surprise to me! After finishing an undergraduate double degree (Business/Arts) in 1998, I thought I'd never study again. Then, after finishing a grad dip in health promotion in 2003, I thought I'd never study again. So I started my Masters in Public Administration in 2006. After finishing that in 2008, I thought I'd never study again... Can you see a trend emerging?)
The home we're currently living is the third property I've "owned" (meaning the third the bank has owned on my behalf). My first was a little one-bedroom flat with a cold, damp, south-facing courtyard, in which I struggled to grow anything at all. My greatest "garden" success there was some succulents on my kitchen windowsill, and "doing the gardening" meant removing a few dead bits from those every now and then.
My second home - the first with my husband - was in the Dandenong Ranges, east of Melbourne. It was a quarter-acre (roughly 1,000sqm) block - pretty small for a property in the hills - and was home to about 11 enormous mountain ash, which, although beautiful, made sure that nothing ever got much sun, and sucked most of the substantial (even in a drought) rainfall straight out of the ground. It was a challenging garden! I had a great time experimenting with shade-friendly plants (hellebores being a perpetual favourite) and had success with Dandenongs staples like rhododendrons, camellias and a stunning dogwood that was my pride and joy. But I longed to be able to buy all those things that thrive in full sun (including just about all pretty little flowering annuals!).
In 2010, after suffering a little from isolation while at home full-time with my first daughter, and having seen Victoria experience the devastation of the Black Saturday bushfires in 2009 (from which the Dandenongs, thankfully, were spared), we decided to re-enter suburbia. We found ourselves a pretty little weatherboard on a subdivided block in Melbourne's outer east, which needed almost no work inside, but offered plenty of potential outside.
The garden was very neat, and its bare bones were good, but there are only so many "low-maintenance" strappy leaved plants that I can handle. The garden was full of dietes (described as "virtually unkillable" and a "great choice for lazy gardeners), liriopes (which, when not in flower look a lot like dietes), and had a very immature weeping cherry (prunus) in the centre of a raised garden bed smack-bang in the middle of our north-facing front lawn. There was a lot of bare dirt, which looked ok when just weeded, but quickly revealed an unimaginable profligation of weeds, particularly the dreaded oxalis.
Since we came here in mid-2010, there's not much about the garden planting that I haven't changed. The basic shape of the garden -- the raised garden beds -- has not changed, and the pittosporum hedge inside the front fence has been clipped but nothing more. Even the weeping cherry didn't survive unscathed -- but it did survive a move to a different garden bed...
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