Room Three has Begun
The Autumnal equinox is on us and going forward things are only going to get colder and bleaker. It sounds quite doom and gloom and this season, although we aren’t having the rain we had last year, the ordinary gentle descent into the cooler weather has been more of a rapid plunge! It hasn’t been as dramatic as flipping a switch, but by now we are normally still basking in the lingering summer warmth and pretending the seasonal change happens today.
At this point, the meteorological calendar seems more accurate as the last three weeks have been classically autumnal. There was even snow down in the south. The first frost normally occur sometime between April and June so there is no kidding us – the glory days of the high season are well and truly behind us and in front of us is increasingly chilly, wet and miserable weather.
This is why it is a good idea to have a project to get excited about, one that brings joy and lifts the spirits. Now it would make sense for this project to be an indoor one to ensure satisfaction and gratification of a job well done can be done in the most inclement weather. Unfortunately, I’m not the one of the sensible people and I have just embarked on a massive project – one that happens outdoors.
I have begun work on Room Three of The Palace Garden. As a quick recap, The Palace Garden has been inspired by the royal rooms in the grand palaces of places like Hampton Court in England and Versailles in France. I noticed that, unlike our modern homes with a corridor running through the house with doors leading off into rooms, in the royal chambers – to get from the first room to the last room you have to go through all the rooms. And each room is opulently decorated but vastly different from each other in colour and style. So, I thought it would be fun to have a series of garden rooms on our only spare flat-ish bit of land that are all wildly different, but connected by a path that runs through each one.
The first garden is the Thankful Garden. It is a place to stop, remember and be thankful. In the centre is a large rock that I made out of cement, chicken wire and fabric in a paper mâché style. The rock is like a memorial stone – placed to remember where good things happened. It has chamomile planted at it’s base for a calming influence and a clipped hedge of rosemary for remembrance. The path is made of reclaimed bricks to reflect the reclaimed nature of our house – with it being saved from destruction 200kms away.
The next room is The Time Garden and it mostly a native planted garden that over time will grow to fill its place. It is currently in the midst of the second year creep. Last year it slept, and next year it will leap, and I look forward to my vision coming to full abundance. The time element of this garden is a set of stairs takes you up the hill to a small lookout to view the entire garden and out to sea. This is where I first attempted bricklaying and loved the process. I created a plinth to hold a sundial that still hasn’t been glued down. We went up there to do it and it was cloudy so we couldn’t see the shadow and never managed to go back with the glue! The corners of the plinth are positioned at points of the compass so you can orient yourself and see which way is North. The building of the plinth created a hole in the centre, and I thought ‘waste not, want not’ and filled it with a time capsule to be opened after I’m long gone.
I was on track for doing a garden a year across The Palace. I’m no spring chicken and I’m not sure how many good digging years I have, but if I want to realise my dream we need to get cracking. However, it was at this point I also discovered maintenance is just as important as creation, so I took a year off from my empire building to restore order in areas that were getting away on me and took on some regular help to manage it all. So, these days routine tasks are given priority to ensure everything looks good, all the time.
But I spent the year dreaming and planning in my head. I had a notebook where I would jot down ideas as they came to me and slowly and surely I formed a vision in my head of Room Three and it looks amazing – you should see it! However, it was daunting. It is more complicated than the first two rooms but needs to meet the rules I’ve set for The Palace – it has to be low maintenance and only plants that won’t spread across the sand dunes are welcome. If something escapes and becomes a problem in the wild – everyone will know where it came from!
But you have to start somewhere and sometimes you can procrastinate too long – well I can, so I put the start in someone else’s hands. I asked my neighbour with a tractor to pop over when he had a moment to scrape off my grass. Well, it turned out he had a moment yesterday and in a couple of hours transformed the landscape from lush grass to a sandy bare earth.
All I need to do now is reach into the soft soil and pull out loose kikuyu rhizomes. I’ve done this process before and by giving the garden the once over, once a week, within six weeks I should have a clean patch of land to begin to apply the vision I have in my head. Fun times!
Come again soon – there is something amazing beginning to form.
Sarah the Gardener : o)
Such floor plans are reminiscent of ‘the Masque of the Red Death’. I remember it though, from pictures of an English home garden on a very narrow but deep urban parcel. Brent (my colleague down south who is a landscape designer) prefers to design relatively small landscape ‘rooms’ around a large central room. I know nothing of design, and would prefer my overly utilitarian garden to resemble row crops, but I do like his very functional home garden. The relatively large central room is dominated by a pair of sycamores and wisteria, which would be appropriate here. Another nearby room is dominated by tall queen palms, so is more Southern Californian. An elevated room to the west is dominated by bamboo palms and vegetation that looks more like Florida. However, none of the rooms is too vastly ‘different’ from any of the others. ‘English cottage gardens’ are a fad here, but are really quite Californian in layout, as well as much of the material.
That garden sounds really interesting! I think I’m limited here in that I doubt I’ll be able to have large trees – the wind is just too strong. It won’t stop me trying though! : o)
The style does not require trees. It is more of a layout, . . . which might not be as practical in your garden either because it is not so flat. My former home garden was quite steep, with small terraces connected by a single trail, which was more like the style of yours. Of course, there were more utilitarian than aesthetic.
Love the way your garden is evolving!
I think I would get a little bored without some kind of project! : o)
It’ll be fun to see what you create.
I’m looking forward to this project, although I’m slightly daunted by it! : o)