Where the Gardens meet the Bush

The late afternoon light picks out the sculpted landforms of The Hill Garden very clearly.  It is easy now to forget that The Hill Garden and the Courtyard are actually man made earthworks,  having been created since we did the first excavation for the Wine Cellar in May 1996.  It all seems to fit so naturally into the landscape that our landscaping interventions now go unnoticed.  That's a good thing.

The Hill Garden is intended to create a transition zone between the main gardens around the house and the untouched native bushland beyond.  In practical terms it serves as a firebreak and in aesthetic terms the line where "cultivation" ends and the "wilderness" begins is blurred by this garden. Form follows function.

This garden was inspired by the concepts of Wolfgang van Oehme and James van Sweden in their "new American Gardens" of the late twentieth century and the influential 1990 book "Bold Romantic Gardens" is here in our library. Following their inspiration we use grasses as a major visual component of The Hill Garden.  Take a look in the slideshow for photographs of grasses here at The Drip taken by Rick Martin.

Sheltering the Soil

Bare soil is dying soil. The harsh Australian sun beating down on unprotected soil destroys the microscopic lifeforms, including nitrogen-fixing bacteria,  which are the basis of soil vitality. The onset of climate change and  increasingly frequent extreme temperature events will make the situation worse in the future. We need an adaptive strategy.

Our strategy here is simple. We use inorganic mulches, such as gravel , in "Dry Zone " gardens and in the "Wet Zone" gardens we use organic mulches; for example, the mix of  straw from the chook yard mixed with  rice husks shelters the soil and provides nutrition to the vegetable beds in The Espaliery.   The soil under these mulches remains cool and vibrant, filled with worms even on the hottest of days.

We must also remember that garden design is not just just about functionality , it is also about creating a thing of beauty.  So here at The Drip we are now exploring the design potential  of mulches. The possibility of creating  strong visual contrast with different mulches,  organic and inorganic, is one worthwhile avenue to explore.  Design features can arise out the practical necessities of creating a garden which responds to the challenges posed by climate change.

Stuff We Like

The Zen temple gardens of Japan, as seen in this photograph of Ryogen in  Kyoto, can provide an ancient inspiration for a modern aesthetic.

Not only is this garden,  with its expanse of raked white gravel, incredibly beautiful and contemplative but it seems that it is also relevant to our garden in other ways.  Dry zones, with the soil protected by gravel mulches,  can be left unplanted creating very pleasing "negative space" within the overall design.  Though the monks who created the Ryogen garden had other things in mind,  at the very least this is a damn good way of saving on water usage and protecting the living soil from intense heat,  both of which are important in these times of global climate change.
 
The Main Courtyard here at The Drip has been filled with locally sourced white limestone grave.  It gleams in the moonlight. 

Can We Beat the Heat?

As the long term effects of global climate change become more apparent we now must focus on adapting to these increasingly extreme weather conditions.  Given the worldwide failure of government  policies to address the underlying causes of climate change, it seems  that adaptation is now  perhaps all we can hope to do.

After the recent floods, cyclones are now striking Queensland and here  at The Drip in Mudgee  the temperatures are soaring.  Day after day we  are hitting thirty seven degrees Celsius or one hundred degrees Fahrenheit.  Last week we went over forty degrees Celsius. Where two months ago we had floodwaters, now we look down the valley into shimmering heat haze.  The soil bakes. The main house at The Drip was designed primarily with climate change in mind and remains relatively cool even without air conditioning but out in the gardens many plants are suffering.  So ... shade giving structures in the gardens become increasingly important.  

In The Espaliery we will soon be planting new vegetable seedlings, protected by shadecloth and kept moist with drip irrigation on automatic timers.  Time will tell if these strategies are successful.

Midsummer Growth

Midsummer pruning and weeding needs continual attention in the "garden rooms" surrounding the house. These gardens and orchards are the most productive areas of the property and as a consequence are the most labour intensive.

Usually things wouldn't get out of hand like the Cut Flower Garden in the photo above, but as a result of the floods in November everything went a bit sideways.  In the Cut Flower Garden, the lavenders all drowned in the floods and the weeds took over.  Two months later, the soil in here is still very moist , temperatures are consistently high and the growth is exceptional for this time of year.

It will be interesting to see just how long it takes to get this area back to being manageable again.  And once it is sorted out, then ideally a few person-hours a week is all that should be needed to keep this garden attractive and productive.

Less is More

It's plum season and there are hundreds of plums.  Too many plums. The Japanese Blood Plums are now finished, either eaten fresh or stewed and stored.  Only one French plum tree remains to be harvested.

We mucked up our timing this year, not thinning the crop of all our summer fruit when we should have, so ended up with fallen fruit on the ground.  This is not a good thing and meant a lot of work in picking up fruit in the hope of avoiding future problems with fruit fly and diseases. Damn.

We will now start a better diary/calendar system to help steer our way through the seasons.  First step is already online here, called "Cooking with Clive " this page shows when all the fruit trees here are ready for picking and processing.  We have almost a hundred varieties of fruit and nuts growing here now so this page should prove very useful.WE should aim for quality not quantity.

Elephant Garlic

Until today I had no idea what Rick Martin was talking about when he mentioned the Elephant Garlic he has been growing in the Espaliery.  Now  I do and this is a photo of it. Obvious really.

Each individual clove of Elephant Garlic  is as big or bigger than a whole bulb of most varieties of garlic.

Tonight we discover what it tastes like. And there are dozens of varieties of garlic to explore.