EARLY SPRING, VISITORS

Two weeks, it is, since last I posted… It is the time of the Spring Festival; accommodation and the open garden at Sequoia Gardens and MountainGetaways are keeping me very busy. The unexpected 120mm in early September have resulted in more green than is usual in spring – we are heading for the best spring ever. What a pity the festival is over as my garden gets into its stride… The above photo, a 180 degree panorama, gives an idea of what the valley is looking like. The drive, of course, forms a straight line from left to right, but further away there is less distortion.

To celebrate my birthday I decided it was time to plant the hedges in the Mothers’ Garden, and give some purpose to the strange oblong of basically bare ground visitors find between the curves of the New Old Rose Garden (on the left above) and the big lawn. I finally decided on an informal hedge of Grevillea, (I think G. rosmarinifolia) an easy Australian plant that over many months starting in winter carries charming but unobtrusive coral flowers amongst its grey-green needles l which are greatly appreciated by nectar-loving birds. We also planted an Abelia x ‘Francis Mason’ hedge which will echo in shape the triangular one on the opposite side of the lawn against the Ellensgate Garden, before turning through 90 degrees, dropping to knee height and edging the seating platform. You can see the existing hedge below, together with the wisteria on the pergola in the Anniversary Garden.

These hedges are of course all grown from cuttings. Over the years we have propagated literally tens of thousands of plants to populate the six hectares of garden we have. In the above photo you can see one of the themes we have focused on in getting ready for the festival: making sure the pots were looking good. I am still smarting from a comment made last spring, about which I posted rather angrily over here…

I particularly focused on the area around the entrance, as a month before the festival everything was bleak and wintery and I was despairing about how to convince visitors it was worth even looking at my garden and calling it a spring garden… There is a strange and shady threshold you cross from a very rural parking area into a deliberately formal garden. In the event all the bright colour I decided on turned to shades of brick and mustard with a few white and pale blue highlights. But I think it is more effective and better integrated this way. To celebrate the opening, my huge (and recently transplanted) Mutabilis rose chose to push forth its first blossoms over the pots with colour. Success! On Saturday morning I took some terrible pics of the occurrence. Perhaps tomorrow I can pick up something better. Such has this week been that I’ve not ventured out with my camera leisurely in hand.

Later: a composite below – getting all the detail in one pic was not possible. Rosa chinensis mutabilis opens apricot, fades to straw, then reddens to crimson. Only semi-consciously I chose these colours when selecting my plants; my very first notes years ago for the colours in the Upper Rosemary Border were ‘brick reds and mustardy yellows’.

Since the photo below was taken last week, the struggling, excessively shaded Rosemaries to the left of the pot fountain have been ripped out and replaced with 7 Hydrangea serrata as part of a development in the shade of the tree. A small new paved area with seating will be completed this weekend when I plant the three pots with Acer palmatum ‘Sango-kaku’, the Japanese Coral-bark Maple. Besides being a spot for visitors to rest in the shade, it also sets the scene of rustic formality I wish to impress on them.

This has been the first opportunity in weeks to work with my staff in the garden. However our visitors who have seen the garden before, all commented on how very lovely the garden is looking, how neat and cared for everything appears. It was good to share this news with the staff, because it has mostly been their own initiative that inspired these comments.

Pics of the completed Entrance Room (as I’ve decided to call it) will have to wait for the next post. Here are a few more pics of the entrance area – looking from the entrance and then looking back to it.

The entrance is also where we announce the latest of the tourism initiatives on The Mountain: the TMA  Mountain Bike Trails, two of which pass through Sequoia Gardens, one of 5 and one of 25km:

But back to visitors: allow me to brag with this pic of the visitors’ parking filled with cars last Sunday…

To end: a collage of pots…

 

COME ON IN–THIS IS OPEN HOUSE!

With those words a radio program from my youth called ‘Open House’ started week after week. I remember nothing of it, I guess there was a visitor who then shared stories and favourite music. Anyway – we’ve had open house at Sequoia!

The week-long Haenertsburg Spring Festival started on Saturday. We were ready – for the first time we were officially open to day visitors and we had three cottages to let. The signage went up last week, and all three cottages were fully booked for the weekend.

The post box next to the information board is made of thick solid copper plate. When Louis bought his house ten years ago and threw it out, painted with peeling black and white paint, I claimed it. It has finally been put to (more or less) the use I envisaged for it: I don’t charge an entrance fee, but the pictures top left on the board are of our Rotary Club’s projects, and I request that a donation to the club be put in the box. Count after two days: just on 200 rand, which is only about half of what I would have got if I’d charged an entrance fee… Come on people – give! On the information board there also are maps and information sheets, and a pouch with business cards.

The ‘Boiling Pot’ in its final incarnation. The pots I bought for the four arms of the cross looked hopelessly small and out of scale. So we constructed the bench you see in the above photos for them and the four corners became merely textural changes, contained by painted galvanised plate. As so often happens, simplicity was the answer!

On Saturday the dogs and I got to take a proper walk for the first time in days. I HAD to photograph visitors to the garden… moments later I discovered that the couple behind this lady were good friends from Johannesburg – last year’s Rotary District Governor (like the annual regional president) and his wife. What a lovely surprise!

But it is spring, and I guess I owe you a few wow pictures of spring on the mountain – so here goes!

Up in the arboretum some azaleas demonstrate why we are most famous, despite all the other joys we offer throughout the year, for our spring display of azaleas and blossoms. Mateczka’s joy was entirely related to our walk, and had little to do with aesthetic appreciation  (I think…)

More subtle, but infinitely more precious are moments like this…

This Japanese maple by the water’s edge has the most delicate of red leaves in spring. Within less than a month they are green like those of its neighbour. But for now, fleetingly, the delicacy of their colour is the most beautiful sight on Sequoia!

Let us return to the arboretum, where the view over the garden includes the wisteria in the Anniversary Garden, going fortissimo now, and an ever expanding number of trees whose  leaves are showing their first sparkling green.

Postscript; This was written on Monday evening. By now it is Wednesday evening. I have completely lost the ability to get onto the internet on the computer on which my blog-writer is installed So I had to come in to school where I can connect it to the school’s network in order to post. And Tuesday and Wednesday just sped past… My new life will include new internet at whatever price. I better start investigating!

 

WELCOME VIEW–AND GARDENING GONE WILD ENTRY

I’ve not spent much time in the garden with the camera of late – although I’ve planted up six new blue ceramic pots on the steps up behind the house with winter annuals, and taken 33 cuttings of five different hybrid Phygelius to add to the cuttings of the wild one taken earlier – read more about that here. Walks in the garden have been about the dogs and about simply enjoying autumn: although the spectacular displays are mostly over, vignettes in richer colours remain. The above view is the first impression a visitor would get of the garden on entering from the new entrance at the head of the Rosemary Terrace.

I have also not really added to my stock of possible entries for the Gardening Gone Wild Picture This (pictures here) Contest. I posted about possible entries here, then took a few more shots the following day, none of which warranted either processing or sharing in more than these strips; they are simply too baroque; raindropped close-ups of vivid flowers.

What I have done is look at my possible competition entries from the previous post, enlarging the screen to 200% and simply leaving a photo on screen to glance at over a period. And my favourite, the green leaves of Elephant Ears, has become progressively less interesting, the focus just slightly fuzzy. So I’ve looked at the others…

The fallen leaves are good photos. Better entries. The azalea flowers are an obvious entry, sharp, pretty, striking with interesting backlighting through the flower on the filaments. But perhaps a little predictable. I like the red plane. The Japanese maple leaves? So-so.

But the one I keep coming back to, looking deeper, enjoying the colours, exploring the composition, is the one I thought  of as the also-ran:

So I go back to the photos in sequence  as they came off the camera…

I was surprised when  I found this shot on the camera. But I remember being fascinated by the way the light was coming through the leaves, and leaf-shaped shadows were being cast on other leaves, and the layers of leaves behind leaves. Layering was perhaps the central theme of these three photos and the ones beyond them. And layering IS what I explore in this shot. Most of it is out of focus. But the texture of the Japanese Maple leaves are a constant, in and out of focus. And the colours are glorious with the soft green area off-setting the reds and browns. It becomes almost an abstract of autumn leaves on a maple. So I go back to the instructions… and the final statement is HAVE FUN!

Well  this one is the most fun of all my shots. Decision taken. It is my entry!

 

STOP! FROM THE BEGINNING PLEASE!

Autumn is not getting it right this year. Could we please try again. Not next year – NOW!

No, Jack. YOU stop. Stop finding fault. Stop expecting perfection. Stop that irritating gardener thing of “You should have seen it last week”. Or last year, in this case. Or, in fact, the year before. Because THAT autumn was ravishing. Last year was good and this year… well, so you are disappointed… Get over it. Enjoy it whilst it lasts; it is still far from over.

But yesterday this was the view. And today, when the garden club was visiting, I brought them along here… and the effect had lessened. It should not yet have peaked, but leaves were browning and falling.

Yesterday morning before I went to work (a little later than usual, so there was time for a quick walk), this was what I saw. But this afternoon all of that side of the valley was already in shadow, and they looked across at it with the sun in their eyes. Yes. For once the sun was shining -  and  I moan about it.

I must NOT complain. This is the view that made me set off with my camera yesterday. Not many people start their day like this. And one and all in the garden club told me today how lovely my garden is, and how blessed I am. They are right. So I should not complain. But please: may I KNOW? Know that this autumn is not the greatest. Know that both nature and I can – have – done better. One compliment, though, stands out above all the other: a dear friend who visits the garden regularly, whose photos in fact adorn my cards that I use with gifts and to welcome visitors, told me she had never seen the gardens look so cared for. Not manicured, because like me she likes gardens a little dishevelled: cared for. That compliment I must carry over to my staff tomorrow. They are the ones who achieved it, and every walk I take, I feel it too, and that makes me eternally thankful to them. I have told them so, but when I report back to them tomorrow I will make it abundantly clear how much her comment says of the success of their task.

This month the theme for Gardening Gone Wild’s “Picture This” photo competition is: “Light – look closely”; all about light in close-up and macro photography. I’m doing just that. This is my first study – the last rose of summer, an unexpected blossom on ‘Mothertjie’ where she grows into a tree at the waterlily pond. Study is the wrong word. It was really a snapshot to record the event, which I then prepared as though it was a competition entry. We are not there yet. But ‘Mothertjie’ is rather lovely, none the less.

 

WORKING ON THE NEW VISITORS’ ENTRANCE

At its best the Italian pot which marked the end of the vista down the Rosemary Terrace looked like this. Yet even then the conifer seemed windblown and the Abelia ‘Francis Mason’ cubes were out of scale and straining at the lead. But the perceptive might have noticed the past tense in the above. Because things are changing.

The map – click on it to enlarge – shows the new visitors’ entrance I am working on. The red loop show the anti-clockwise movement of vehicles through the new parking area. And the new entrance will be along the axis of the Rosemary Terrace, past the pot whose sole purpose was to close the vista down the long, narrow terrace in the past. A beginning and an end are not the same I have realised. (Besides – the pot composition was seriously in need of attention, the abelias out of hand and the conifer departed.) Not seen in the photo below, lost in the cube of abelia at the end of the lawn, is the pot…

Now the Italian pot will be one of the first things one sees on entering the garden, and beyond it the terrace flanked by the Rosemary Borders.

How to treat it? For long I considered four clumps of zebra grass to replace the Abelia, then realised they were (a) too seasonal and (b) even more out of scale. Then on impulse I spent too much money on too many plants to give a complex mix of yellow and coloured foliage and orange flowers. And half of them quite tender to boot. Mistaaake… They stand forlorn, waiting for me to figure their future. Meanwhile I found some lovely young box plants in my own nursery. They can form, four to a hole, much smaller, neater cubes around the pot.

But what IN the pot? No longer only an exclamation mark at the end of a vista, it needs to be a welcoming first focal point too. And it is at an awkward height, the lip too close to eye level. Does one put in simple low bedding? Or a trailing foliage plant? What will be multi-seasonal? Low maintenance?

This photo shows how the abelia hedge behind the pot has been removed for the width of the terrace, and gives an idea of the arch that will be cut through the dense maples to frame this view from the entrance. The old concept of yellow foliage against green no longer is valid. The pot is beautiful as it is. Does it stand empty? And suddenly a vision from a friend’s garden comes to me: a large Chinese jar filled with water, and a pump set to boil just below the surface right in the middle, thus creating little concentric waves which gently move in and out. Eureka! And I need to get electricity to the new entrance anyway!

Back to the past. Here the late lamented Doubly looks down the Rosemary Terrace from the pots which mark its entrance from the path on the axis from the front door. The Upper Rosemary Terrace is newly planted.

 And here he is again, some time later. The borders are looking good, the edges appalling, and the Rosemary hedge, planted as cuttings, reads only in the imagination. The viburnum hedge at the end of the terrace has never had a perfectly horizontal top. That soon must change. These borders – more particularly the Upper Border – are the closest to conventional borders I have. Maintenance and design (or visa versa?) on them need to be upped substantially. For South Africans don’t come to look at formal gardens; not on our mountain anyway. People need to be wowed before being led out around the dams and up into the arboretum…

This rather randomly chosen picture shows that the border is worthy of close inspection. But its real strength is when seen at sundowner time from the stoep (veranda) of the Big House, backlit by the late sun, the dam a black shadow beyond it.

 I love this shot. It has an old-fashioned artificial quality, like an enhanced Edwardian postcard. The cosmos, the Golden Rain Tree and the  Pride of Indias are in bloom, the light golden, and all is well with the world. There will, by the way, be a single jet of water rising through a bed of river stones just to the left of the hedge. It will be visible from the front door down that axis. Semi-completed several years ago, it awaits the installation of electricity for the pump.

There is much work to be done. But it has started. Beneath the roses visible in the wide shot of the Italian pot as it looks at the moment, there stands a yellow bucket. I had just used it whilst planting five different coloured Phygelius in shades exactly matching Rosa mutabilis. At the moment it is ‘Cornelia’, rather pinker, that dominates the composition. But I have no doubt that in years to come there will be a real show-stopper to greet visitors as they enter the garden!

 Late this afternoon I went for a walk in the garden. It was a glorious day after two sharp showers during the night. Roses and many other plants scented the air. I spent time photographing the Rosemary Terrace and Borders. Only when I started photographing the roses – about which a post will follow! – did I realise the camera was somehow set on black and white. So here is yet another very old-fashioned photo, taken from the path and looking back across the whole of the Rosemary Terrace area. Ubiquitous ox-eye daisies and an indigenous diarama (angels’ rod) in the foreground. I think I shall be spending more time with black and white…

 

TAKING OWNERSHIP

‘Tis a while since I posted twice in a day! But important things have happened this weekend, and there is a decision I wish to record…

 First – here is The House that Jack Built, fast getting ready for the spring season. There is still a lot to be done to the garden so that it says more than ‘end of a long winter’ when visitors arrive – but we are getting there! And then there is The Big House…

 Last night I slept in the main bedroom for the first time – a week short of a year, Saturday to Saturday, since I first slept there when the vigil with my mother started. The Big House is becoming mine. And with it I feel myself unfurling like a spring magnolia. There is space to fill… It is a luxury I have not known since I sold my house in Johannesburg. But I love cosy, and did not miss space much, except that I also collect clutter. Then I moved into Trailertrash Cottage in January. Half the size of my cottage, and with a limited view, I soon felt claustrophobic, hemmed in by my endless generation of paper, living in my own detritus. I – and six dogs. And a winter which didn’t seem to end. 

Can you see why this afternoon’s walk did so much to lift my spirits? I write this in short sleeves in front of the open window at night, and I revel in my blossoms and my magnolias. Above is a double white purple-leaved plum – perhaps Prunus cerasus ‘Rhexii’, below is the common but beautiful crabapple, Malus floribunda, and below that one of my many bushes  – of various sizes, colours and flowering habit – of Magnolia x soulangiana. All photographed this afternoon.

 I said there is a decision to record. It was one of those flash insights that make you wonder why it took you so long to find. I’ve been planning guest parking for day visitors – expensive and inconvenient. I suddenly realised how to solve it, simply, with the minimum of levelling, with easier entry and departure and with more space, hidden away from the main garden… and then I realised that the entrance to the garden would then naturally be along the axis of the Rosemary Terrace – my most formal vista. Bring them in to the formal and the manicured, and then let them explore the natural. Aha! Excitement builds. And the grooming of the garden looks more and more like an adventure and everless like a chore!

A photostitched photo from 2006 – two pots flank the entrance from the front door axis on either side of me, and there is a high viburnum hedge behind me. At the far end of the lawn is the Italian pot surrounded by four abelia cubes. An ‘arch’ will be cut through the maples beyond it and a pergola will mark the new entrance from the car park which lies beyond the maples. This is the Rosemary Terrace, flanked by the Upper and Lower Rosemary Borders: the heart of my formal gardens.

 

THOUGHTS ON A YEAR OF BLOGGING

 A pic. I always start with a pic. So what have we here? A bromeliad? A penstemon?

25 July 2010. A year ago today, rather impulsively, I started blogging. Where am I after a year? Some of the statistics surprise me – who would have thought that there would be 12665 visits to my blog during this year? That my busiest day would bring 113 visitors? That I would write 129 posts during the year – well, make this one number 130. Or for that matter that the number of blocked spam  comments would not be too far below the legitimate ones; in fact I guess my own replies were counted, so there are most likely MORE spam comments…

Why did I start? And where do I stand now?

I like to write. I like photography. I love my garden. And – most importantly – it was time my garden made me money by being an advertisement for my gardening talents (oops, sometimes I wonder about that one. Try: garden design talents. I feel more comfortable.)  – and also an advertisement for Sequoia Gardens as a holiday destination: a garden to visit, but above all a place to stay. So my motivation was in many ways monetary.

Have I succeeded? The simple answer is ‘no’, the long one is ‘most probably’. See, one year on I find my life less focused, not more so; more complex, not less so. I am back teaching (part-time only.) I have learnt that never will there be x in your pocket on the 25th of the month. More likely it will be x-y%, or only arrive on the 15th of the next month… so teaching takes the stress of making ends meet away, and part-time teaching leaves some time for the other interests and activities. But the dream of making my passion pay remains. Except I’ve realised that teaching is as much of a passion. It is great to be back.

Bottomline: I’m a real Jack-of-all-trades, and a focused effort at only one thing is as foreign to me as – well as my life is to many other people!

Photographed this morning: The House that Jack Built and The Big House. Trailertrash Cottage between them…

And what a year it has been!

• I nursed my mother for nearly two months, day and night.
• I converted a tiny stone outbuilding into a tiny house, now approaching completion. There is a wonderful definition of wealth and non-wealth in the modern world: the wealthy spend money to save time, the poor spend time to save money. I am poor. The building of Croft Cottage has been hands-on…
• I moved out of The House that Jack Built in order to prepare it for letting as holiday accommodation, and moved into the original caravan house we put up in 1981 before we built the other houses. I rechristened it Trailertrash Cottage, for no matter how neat, the veranda is a mess, home to six (now five) dogs and assorted brooms, pails, gumboots and odds that don’t fit into the tiny house.
• Yesterday I started moving slowly into the Big House. My father has decided, at 81, that he would rather be a house-guest than a home-owner on his occasional visits to the farm. I in turn realised that if my accommodation was cramped before, it was impossible now for someone who generates so much paper on so many different topics… and owns five dogs.
• I was president of my local Rotary Club, and took a strong club and made it stronger. I give myself a big tick for that one – as do my Rotary friends!
• I worked on a few gardens and did some renovation in my own gardens. Nothing that looks wow on my CV there… (And when I started the blog I was still recovering a considerable amount of money from a client whose path had separated from mine 3 months earlier…)

What happened to my blog? Along the way I started developing it as a marketing tool. Very much a work in progress, but before spring it needs to be completed: why come to Sequoia Gardens? Where will I stay and what will it cost me?

Early on I discovered Blotanical.com and most of my traffic I think has come from there. Many new gardening friends – but business…? My following grew from month to month, with only two slight dips between July 2009 and March 2010, when it peaked at almost 2000 views. Since then, a steady decline and I will only just reach 1000 this month. An average month, you might call it, considering the total of a little over 12000 visits.

But an average month at a time when so much else has been happening. An average month with a history of writing already there for anyone wishing to explore my blog.

Like so much in your life, Jack, see what has been achieved, not what is unachieved. Look deeper. See the bigger picture. Don’t get bogged down in details. Don’t make mountains out of mole hills…

Oh and that first picture? It is of moss on a rock…

 

 

 

 

WEEKLY PIC: MARCH10 – WEEK4

Time to take a look again at the Anniversary Garden – laid out to celebrate my parents’ golden anniversary, it is a yellow-gold garden with blue-mauve-purple accents. The central path is flanked by a rosemary hedge and wisterias grow into the pergola.

Today we had our first ever visitors to the open garden: a local family who visit often; a family from Johannesburg who were the ‘official first ever visitors’ and were wonderfully enthusiastic; and a couple from Botswana. It is a long weekend in South Africa. Yesterday the Ebenezer Mile Swim took place, organised by our Rotary Club, and the village is abuzz with visitors. An article in our local quarterly newsletter, which appeared on Wednesday, alerted readers to the fact that Sequoia Gardens is open. Such is the wonder of modern communications that you can read the newsletter anywhere in the world should you so wish, because it forms part of our eponymous website www.mountain-getaways.co.za – you will find me on page 6.

Now I need to spend the rest of the day getting the marketing side of my blog updated. You’ll see changes in the header line below the masthead. Any comments on how I’ve gone about it – or should have! – will be gratefully studied.