Life is what happens

Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans - John Lennon, and others before him. One day, we will move to a town house on False Bay. This garden has been about the roses. Ungardening Pond. The view to Elephant’s Eye. The two huge ash trees. The weaver birds in the giant/Spanish reeds.

Now I see the roses in Paradise AND Roses
Anna's Apricot, Duftwolke and Pearl of Bedfordview

We will not have a sea view. This picture was taken thru the rain-splattered windscreen of the moving car. Milky sea glass green. Pearl and anthracite beach sand. The darkness of washed up kelp. Blues across sea, sky and distant mountain. Flashes of colour – burgundy red seaweed, yellow daisy bushes, electric pink vygies on the sand dunes. 

False Bay, new colours to explore 

We will plant trees to shield us from the neighbours, but still catch a glimpse of the hills. Choosing the smaller indigenous trees or Brachylaena, whose leaves flash the silver below when whipped by the southeaster.

Camphorbush and our mountain

The livingroom will open to a patio, flowing to a back garden of trees and small pond with a secluded Rest and Be Thankful beneath a bergkaree bower.

Rest and Be Thankful

The dwarf papyrus will live in pots, and put on town manners.

Dwarf papyrus

Ludwig’s says the answer is to use large pots for roses, then sink them into the ground so just the lip shows. I’d like to take cuttings of my Old Cape rose Black Prince. First I saw Belle Époque with terracotta buds opening to a burnished bronze. Then I turned to the fading calyx on the strandsalie echoing the same bronze, with added metallic shimmer!

Belle Époque
strandsalie calyx  

My Winter Chill, Summer Gold, Autumn Fire and Spring Promise will play out with mostly indigenous plants.  We have such a wide choice of right plant right place. But there will be a few invited foreigners – my Swiss husband, Japanese maple, Mexican Echevieria, Moroccan Aeonium …

Instead of overshadowing the quieter charm of our indigenous plants with the commonorgarden colour of rose blooms, I will enjoy the textures and subtleties on the road less travelled. The feathers on Artemisia, the teeth on Melianthus, the blue haze as the Plectranthus has claimed the garden, and yes, loud brash colour from daisies and pelargoniums.

Paradise and the NOT roses
Artemisia afra (wildeals), Plectranthus neochilus
Euryops, Melianthus

The garden ideas get honed and refined. I hope to enclose the front garden – with a face brick wall (not a fan of white paint), with arrow slits. I like to play with formal garden ideas and our not expected NOT exotic plants. Outside I’ll plant spekboom Portulacaria afra. Reducing our carbon footprint. Any prunings will grow. In front the contrasting texture of spiny aloes. At their feet a row of Bulbinella. That gives me texture, leaf colour, continual tangerine flowers for the bees, seasonal winter interest with nectar for the sunbirds from the aloes. An English hedgerow reinterpreted. I can’t hardly wait!

One day hedge of succulents

There will be a paved enclosed courtyard where I will grow a Japanese maple, orchids from my mother, Streptocarpus. My stash of inspiration includes Franschhoek with Monty Don and Mont Pellier, Elgin's Open Gardens and Victoria’s new garden Awkward Hill in Bibury.
PS Stacy's comment reminds me that her Microcosm in New Mexico is a space in which each plant is cherished, and when the neighbours get too noisy we will escape to Cape Point Nature Reserve or Silvermine.

Pictures and words by Diana of  Elephant's Eye

- wildlife gardening in Porterville, 
near Cape Town in South Africa

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