Silvery grey camphor bush

Tarchonanthus

I love grey foliage. My Dusty Millers, now in need of rejuvenation. Take cuttings and make silver fountains again, instead of the broken golden limbs. The lamb’s ears, a beautiful idea, but they too are withered and gone. Will spread the Santolina instead. They are both commonorgarden foreigners. Grey foliage is more striking when it is a treeful.

The second grey tree is Brachylaena discolor growing in our new False Bay garden.

Tarchonanthus camphoratus

March garden walk

Mid-month I aim to cover exotic, alien, commonorgarden plants blooming in our garden. Especially the roses. Yes, well. It has been a long hot summer, about 10 weeks with no rain. And each time I look, another plant has waved goodbye. Apparently the roses have thrips, tiny creatures who come from the hot dry Out There to lovely luscious, fed and watered, yummy roses. Today I fed the roses and watered them to encourage the autumn flush, which should be their best time of year. There are buds, both flowers, and leaves coming up from the base. We’ll see. If this autumn weather holds kind, and does not hammer us with an unseasonal heat wave, as it did last year. Then, we lost many of our optimistic newly planted olive trees.

March lilies are Proudly South African.

When the Ungardener is Ungardening on the roof – you know, leaves out of the gutters, resealing the chimney. So you walk down the driveway past the olives, and our greener neighbours, around the curved wall of the rose garden, which I call Paradise. Perhaps I should call it the And Roses garden.

Paradise, the rose garden

On Ungardening Pond 4

In May we walked together in hopeful optimism round our pond. By June you can see winter rain falling, and filling the pond, but, to our mounting despair, you can also see a tideline on the beach. He looks at me sadly and says we keep topping up, it’s winter, can’t be evaporation. There must be a leak!

June, with an exposed tideline on the beach
and winter rain