How green is our garden

Clint has become somewhat a green finger ever since we put our gardens in. He really enjoys getting out there and watering it as he admires his handy work. Aside from the initial $700 we have spent on plants from a wholesale nursery, everything else has been cuttings given to us by friends and Clint’s clients.

I mentioned last week that Clint chopped the pillars down along the front of the fence. Well now for that promised photo of what it looks like.  But first, we need to revisit what it looked like when we bought the house:

 

Gee, you really don’t realise how much you have achieved until you look back. Now this is what it looks like today:

 

Just to give you some idea as to where we are going with the front yard, the wall will eventually be painted to match the house (when we also decide on the colour and paint that!). Where the stairs come down will be a wooden bridge from bottom step to front door. This bridge will be covered with a portico. All the cement next to the house will come up and in it’s place will be tropical gardens with stones and a walkway.  At the very end we are planning on some sort of feature wall with perhaps a water feature. Still a lot to be done but it is certainly going gangbusters and the plants obviously happy in their new home. It has made a difference getting rid of the tree that spat sap on everything. The plants seem to be flourishing now.

In other news, we have applied to council for them to remove the humungous rubber tree that is on the green belt behind our property. It’s right at the very base of the garden which is at least a 5 metre drop and yet the tree towers over our 2 storey house and is about 10 metres in width from branch to branch. Being a rubber tree, it is evasive and it’s roots are shooting up all over our yard, damaging our retaining walls and storm water pipes. It’s just the otherside of the border of our property so unless council do something about it, we are stuck with it and any further damage it may cause. We expected our application would take months to get a response on but it was actually less than a week. A council representative came out this week to look at the tree and the damage it is causing our retaining walls. I don’t want to get my hopes up just yet but it is looking promising that it will be removed, particularly because the rubber tree is classes as a noxious weed. So stay tuned folks, we could have a positive outcome here!

Have fun!