Eloise Faith: February 2016

After living in this house for about...ohhh...5 minutes, I was sick of the lawns. We have been very, very blessed with a house that, despite being built on a steep cliff-face, has already been retained and terraced. This is definitely the worst and most difficult as well as most expensive part of garden landscaping!

The result: gardens - or more specifically - lawns on four levels. And we are not just talking a step or two between levels. Just from the garage where the lawn mower is stored, down to the first level we have about 20 steps. It doesn't get much better from there on down to the house!

So I have been systematically digging up the lawns. Here is a picture of the front of our house and the 'best' lawn:

My landscape plan basically consisted of taking a line from the corner of the house straight across the lawn to the fence. This would be retained with two railway sleepers with steps in the centre of them. A small pergola would also be built over the steps. The area below the retainer would be cut-and-fill levelled with 500mm pavers at the centre and a narrow border garden around the edge. The old rotting picket fence was also to be replaced with a 1500mm paling fence.

STEP ONE: CLEAR THE AREA
This didn't take long. There was one scraggly Coprosma in the corner and some kind of bushy shrub under the bay window. The lawn got the RoundUp treatment and a few weeks later was all gone.

As my hard-working husband was far too busy at work (in our garden centre!) to do the landscaping himself, he found a wonderful life-saver in our dear friend, Murray. Murray worked tirelessly digging and moving the dirt to level the patio area. He also built the new fences around the garden, paved the entire area, built the retaining wall and steps and finally constructed a beautiful and elegant pergola to our combined design while we were taking a Christmas break. I can see the pergola while driving along the motorway below our house and I think of him every time: Murray was struck down by cancer and died a few months later not six months after finishing our project.

The part that of clearing that my boys most enjoyed with removing the old fence. They took to it with sledgehammer (I will never take a 9-year old boy to the hardware store to buy a sledgehammer again - we barely made it out alive!) and baseball bat!

And finally we had a nice (mostly-) clear area to construct our patio on:

We hosted Christmas that year for my husband's family. Christmas dinner was to be a bbq on the patio, so it was imperative we had finished it for the day (my husband's family owns a nursery). I was still planting on Christmas Eve, but it was ready on the day!

I have a tendency to like many different types of garden styles and don't want to miss out on any of them. I decided that this one would have an Italian style to it. I will list the plants used below

One year on, it is flourishing beautifully. The classical (but fake) stone water feature has gone to a better home after my dog leaned to heavily on it to drink one day, but the roses have been wonderful, giving me huge bouquets of up to 20 blooms for every room of the house. There will be some tweaking this autumn as the shrubs get a bit bigger, but it's been so lovely and peaceful. We thought that there would be a lot of wind on the northern face of the hill that it is located, however the trees on the slope below, as well as the paling fence, have created a hot little basin where it's just roasting on a nice day. The next job is to find a suitably massive table setting and bench seats to host alfresco dinners.