Serenity Flower Garden

Kelly Chris

Description

A beautiful gardening book with photos, illustrations and detailed advice, showcasing the creation of a cool climate garden on the edge of the Blue Mountains of NSW Australia over a ten year period.
Over the course of ten years Chris chronicles the creation of her cool-climate garden on the edge of the Blue Mountains in Hartley NSW, from bare paddock to established garden. Through flooding rains and hailstorms, droughts, impending bushfires and heat waves she takes us through the challenges and the successes, peppering the story with detailed growing advice. She describes how with an artist’s eye, hard work, passion and perseverance she designed and cultivated a flourishing environment with a perennial border, orchard, vegie patch, woodland, wisteria arbour, lavender garden, cutting garden, native heath, ponds, deciduous and flowering trees, a fairy garden, rose arbour and a rose garden with over 450 roses. Following the story of the transformation of the garden, the reader witnesses the creation of a beautiful, peaceful garden sanctuary abounding with birds, frogs and other local wildlife.

Sujets

• Jardinage
• Techniques de jardinage
• Jardin décoratif
• Flowers
• Gardening

Informations

• Publié par: Balboa Press AU
• Date de parution: 07 décembre 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781982296155
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 6 Mo

Extrait

Serenity Flower Garden
The story of how a passionate woman turned a grassy paddock into a beautiful garden
CHRIS KELLY

 
Copyright © 2022 Chris Kelly.
 
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
 
 
 
Balboa Press
A Division of Hay House
1663 Liberty Drive
Bloomington, IN 47403
www.balboapress.com.au
AU TFN: 1 800 844 925 (Toll Free inside Australia)
AU Local: 0283 107 086 ([phone] from outside Australia)
 
Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.
 
ISBN: 978-1-9822-9614-8 (sc)
ISBN: 978-1-9822-9615-5 (e)
 
 
 
Balboa Press rev. date: 12/05/2022

CONTENTS
Dedication
Garden Quick Facts
 
Chapter 1 The Dream
Chapter 2 Designing Ideas
Chapter 3 The First Tree Planting
Chapter 4 A Slow Start to Building
Chapter 5 Laying the Foundations
Chapter 6 Making Progress
Chapter 7 Planting the First Roses
Chapter 8 Moving In
Chapter 9 The First Flowers
Chapter 10 A Hot Christmas
Chapter 11 Flash Floods and Snakes
Chapter 12 Planting the Orchard
Chapter 13 Four Milestones
Chapter 14 Bare Rooted Roses and More Trees
Chapter 15 Spring Brings Unwelcome Surprises
Chapter 16 The Return of Good Weather and More Planting
Chapter 17 Wetland and Water
Chapter 18 Planting Phase Two of the Rose Garden
Chapter 19 Spring Arrives Again
Chapter 20 More Time for the Garden
Chapter 21 Rabbit Exclusion
Chapter 22 Continuing Growth
Chapter 23 Taps, Gates, Steps and Compost bins
Chapter 24 More Planting, More Paths and a Party
Chapter 25 Structures and Sadness
Chapter 26 Garden Art
Chapter 27 The Guinea Fowl Saga
Chapter 28 Hailstorm
Chapter 29 The Few More Garden Beds
Chapter 30 Heatwaves and Fires
Chapter 31 The Perennial Border and Native Heath Garden
Chapter 32 Good Seasons Return
Chapter 33 The Biodiversity
Chapter 34 The Wettest Year Since 1859
Chapter 35 A Little More on Roses
Chapter 36 The End That Isn’t an End
 
Appendix: Plant Lists
DEDICATION
This book is dedicated to my parents, Kevin and Judy Smith, and grandma Dorothy Sissons, who taught me the basics of gardening and fostered my love of the outdoors; and to Kim (Kimmie) Crawford, who showed me that one woman alone can create a large garden.

GARDEN QUICK FACTS
Location
Hartley NSW Australia (just west of the Blue Mountains National Park)
Area
1.98 hectares (5 acres)
Soil
Neutral silty loam over clay
Altitude
780 m (2560 ft) above sea level
Annual average rainfall
650 mm
Annual rainfall range 2013 – 2021
400 – 1041 mm
Climate
Cool temperate (up to 50 frosts per year down to -8°C, occasional light snow, warm summers)
Average temperatures
Winter daytime average 12°C
Summer daytime average 25 °C maximum approx. 39°C
Website
www.serenityflowergarden.com

“That flower represents something fresh, beautiful, the Buddha inside of us.”
Thich Nhat Hanh, All in One, One in All. 2001
CHAPTER 1
The Dream

I am sitting on a seat in my rose garden sipping a cup of tea, the fragrance of hundreds of roses is wafting in the warm air around me, the gorgeous soft hues of old-fashioned blooms, spectacular hybrid teas and abundant floribundas and modern shrub roses greeting my gaze. As a backdrop I have the picturesque sandstone cliffs and eucalypt-clad hills of the Blue Mountains lending a very Australian feel to my growing garden. The young trees behind me have recently finished their spring blossoming – magnolias, crab apples, pears and plums were all in their delicate finery a few weeks ago, now flush with the lime green of fresh spring foliage. I can hear the chooks clucking contentedly in their pen, the wetland ponds are full of water and the frogs and native wood ducks have made them their home. I feel amazed at how much I have achieved – nature responds fantastically when given a little helping hand. After ten years of hard work coupled with creativity and inspiration and a good dose of determination, my garden is finally looking established and the plan I designed many years ago has come into fruition. It has been a long journey to grow this serene garden at my home in Hartley.
I remember driving through Hartley with my family when I was a child, and being captivated by the beautiful scenery. Travelling west from Sydney on the Great Western Highway, after the rugged beauty of the Blue Mountains the Hartley area suddenly appears as a tranquil, green valley of lush pasture and in earlier days, apple orchards. Most of the orchards are now gone, but the valley is still as beautiful as ever, backed by the rock escarpment that encircles the valley. At 800 m above sea level it experiences cold, frosty winters and has a true change of seasons.
I think I was born with an innate love of plants and birds – it was always there. Certainly around the age of seven I have clear memories of asking my mother the names of the plants in our home garden. I think my parents must have done a lot of planting in the garden around that time, as I remember visiting a nursery with them as well. One day I asked my mother the name of a particular plant and she couldn’t remember it, but she showed me a scrap book where she had glued all the plant labels from nearly every plant in the garden. I was enthralled! Here I could see not just the common name, but that every plant also had a Latin name! And some notes on how to grow the plant! I loved this idea. She helped me learn how to pronounce them, and I would walk around the garden speaking each plant’s Latin name out loud. I still remember some of them – Fatsia japonica, Cordyline stricta, Juniperus sabina …. My parents also had twelve standard hybrid tea roses planted along the edge of the driveway. They were all the popular ones of the 1960’s, and I thought they were beautiful. I must have seen a flower competition somewhere and I would create my own make-believe flower competitions, judging each bloom and announcing a winner. I had four siblings but spent a lot of time in my own dreamy world in the garden alone. I also collected insects and learnt the names of all the local birds. So I guess I was always a nature lover. When I was twelve years old my father enlisted my help with the mowing, as my older brothers were very reluctant. For some reason this made me feel special. It was hard work though, as we had a lot of lawn. My father had a self-propelled mower but one day it got away from me and was rolling along straight towards the azalea bed. I screamed for Dad and he brought it under control just in time. After that I only used the push mower.
As I grew older I dreamed of having my own little acreage somewhere in Australia, with an orchard, a veggie patch, a large garden with lots of flowers and chickens. It took many years through life’s ups and downs – marriage, a baby, divorce, marriage again, living and working overseas, another divorce and finally returning to Australia ready to make my long-held dream a reality. I always had gardens in previous homes so I had learnt a lot about gardening already, but there was still a lot to learn. And this would be my forever garden.
I started looking for suitable blocks of land whilst living and working in Switzerland from 2008 to 2011. Long winter nights were spent browsing real estate websites comparing different blocks for sale. I looked at a variety of areas to get an idea of what was on offer, considering different size blocks, some cleared and some not, some with houses others without. But I kept being drawn back to Hartley, which I had always loved. The land seemed to be good value, the soil is good, and the area is easily accessible being only two hour’s drive from Sydney or 15 minutes to the Blue Mountains or Lithgow. I was particularly drawn to a small new estate backing onto the River Lett. I kept an eye on it for a while, but as I saw the blocks selling off over a period of 18 months, I decided I’d better make a move before I missed out. I visited the estate first in October 2008, then again in December 2009, before making a final decision in January 2010.
2010 was to be a year of new beginnings for me, taking affirmative action to improve my finances which had suffered during my second marriage due to disappointing investments, and to start planning the life that I had been dreaming about for so long. I had a couple more years to live in Switzerland, so I had plenty of time to put the plans into place, step by step.
The block I finally chose is a 2-hectare (5 acre) rectangle, mostly level and cleared, with only 4 mature eucalypts remaining. This is what