It is the first day of spring here in Australia and in a season when a garden should be filled with colour and looking beautiful, mine has never looked worse! With plans almost finalised for our house extension, and some major landscaping in the works, we have been ignoring the garden for the last 6 months.
We had some very tall trees in our front and back gardens, and were advised by an arborist to remove them as they were in danger of falling on either our house - or our next door neighbour's - in the next big storm (apparently years of drought and then heavy rains are not good for trees). We felt terrible cutting down such established trees but it just wasn't worth the risk. So we have sawdust everywhere from the stump grinding of the trees, large palm branches taken from around the pool area are all over our patch of grass waiting to go in a skip, and weeds that have grown almost as high as the fence are taking over all the planting beds. Certainly not a pretty spring garden.
I was feeling a bit depressed this morning at not being able to improve things until we get the garden levels right so I popped into the garden centre to buy myself something pretty to put on our deck. These double impatiens (impatiens walleriana) look just right in this old wheelbarrow I bought from an op shop a couple of years ago. At least I now have a spot of spring colour to enjoy in my gorgeous chairs from Cape Cod Designs.
