Covering Up

Last week,  with relentlessly high extremes of temperature,  might not seem the best time to be planting out young vegetable seedlings.  But we decided to give it a go after  putting in  some preparatory  groundwork to ensure they had a good chance of survival.

Rick created a simple shaded area over one of the beds in the Espaliery using four tall steel posts and a piece of 70% shadecloth.  Importantly, this was quick to put up and easy to take down, giving great flexibility. Clive set up a timed irrigation system, with the plants getting a drink in the cool of the morning and again in the evening. 

So far so good.

Getting off the Beaten Track

Beyond the cultivated areas of the property lies another world.  Here you will find sandstone cliffs carved into fantastic shapes by thirty million years of wind and water, schlerophyll forests, lush ferns, masses of rock orchids and abundant wildlife including several species of wallaby, wombats, goannas and the rich diversity of birds that has made the Munghorn Gap a mecca for birdwatchers.  Of the sixty acres comprising The Drip approximately forty are bushland. 
 

The Waterfall Walk , which was mentioned in yesterdays blog,  is a great way to begin exploring  our bushland here at The Drip.  It is a relatively easy walk, involving a bit of scrambling over rocks but nothing too serious.  Remember to take drinking water with you and it's best to wear long trousers.

We will mark the Walk with pegs at some time in the near future to make it even easier. 

Making Tracks

Ensuring all-weather access to the important areas of a property is one of the first steps in achieving a workable landscape design.  The recent floods reminded us  just how important this can be.

The track across the hillside below The Citrus Grove, a simple  path  mown through native grassland, runs alongside the intermittent watercourse and  leads to The Bush Garden and to the campsite beside The Gully Garden.   Apart from a few hours at the height of the recent  floods this allowed access from the house to all areas on the far side of the watercourse. 

The track continues on beside the creek and leads eventually to The Waterfall.  To find out more about the The Waterfall Walk look in the page called  "Garden Design at The Drip."

Simplification

Analyzing the photograph from yesterday's posting has resulted in a rethinking of how the bank on the left of the photo could be treated.  The original idea was to plant masses of lavender.  Very Provencal; you get the general idea no doubt.  But stopping the local native grasses swamping the lavenders would involve a massive amount of initial work and high ongoing mainenance. It is time to simplify things.

Native grasses, in particular the original Kangaroo Grass which is now returning here,  can  provide all the visual interest that is needed to make this area aesthetically satisfying. The beauty of these grasses lies in their seasonal changes of colour and texture, the movement  they add  to the gardens when the wind and the light catches them and  also the fact that they provide a good food source for the many seed-eating  birds native to this valley.

By removing the existing clumps of lavender that we planted as a trial a few years ago we can simplify the whole area and still achieve high visual impact, allowing the sculptural form of the bank itself to dominate.  The addition of a second line of box hedging above the grassy bank would complete this design; this can be done using our home grown buxus cuttings in the autumn.  Overall,  this simplification will lead to an inexpensive and very low maintenance design with high visual impact.  This approach will be important if we are to achieve our  landscaping ambitions for The Drip.

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(h)Edges

Defining the edges of cultivated garden areas is a fundamental component of garden design.   Edges can be hard, involving the construction of  stuff such as fences and walls; or they can be soft,  using  a wide range of plant materials as hedges or borders.    Here at The Drip we use a lot of Box Hedging, buxus,  to achieve clear definition.

Buxus has certain advantages over other types of hedging.  Firstly, it is suited to the Australian climate, dealing well with extreme heat. Secondly, grazing animals will not eat it ... cattle, sheep,  rabbits, kangaroos, even goats,  won't damage it.  Thirdly, it is slow growing, meaning it can be kept manageable fairly easily; in fact the maintenance of our Box Hedges is much less work than mowing the grassed areas.

A final factor in our choice of hedging is that buxus is very easy and relatively inexpensive  to propagate.  Check out the page on this website called "Propagating Plants at The Drip"  to see more information on this.

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.