From This to This

Isn't it interesting to look back. Here is a photo of the back yard when we started. It had loads of blackberries. The first thing to do was get a rotary hoe and turn over the soil. We paid someone to do that. Then I started from the back fence and worked forwards towards the house. Now I wish I'd planted more carefully at the back - especially along the fence line, which would be covered by now - 8 years on.





It was a big task but very enjoyable except for the mosquitos. The land is clay soil, and tends to be marshy, or bone dry. I brought car loads of oak leaves from where we lived in Melbourne, to improve the soil, but it would have taken hundreds of loads to make a significant difference.
It is a slow process to make a garden on a budget, and maybe some big plants/trees would have paid off, but it's getting better. I don't want anything edible getting too big, because it is hard to control pests if I can't pick them off!

I love palms but they are expensive if you want the good ones, so we settled for cordylines - and I cut the spent leaves and put around the garden to compost.  Lavendar makes great mulch, but rosemary is slower growing , so doesn't need trimmed so much. The different greens feel good to walk amongst...

It's hard to plan a garden that isn't built around the pool, and we wanted a garden, not just a landscaped pool. It took ages to think what would work around the pool itself - eventually we settled for a lavendar hedge to add privacy to the pool itself, and as a windguard on one side, and river stones with olives and a rosemary hedge on the other.  Still a work in progress of course...