THE ICON OF MY GARDEN

I have always said that the bridge across the overflow of Freddie’s dam is the icon of my garden. It forms the focal point of the view from The House that Jack Built, which for ten years was my permanent home, and my holiday home the ten years before that. I miss the bridge, or more precisely the way in which the early morning light plays on the whole composition day after day as it rises behind the house.

Each day is different, each season has its beauty.

Sometimes it is the afternoon light that I notice, as in this shot with its high summer greens.

It is a year since I moved up to the big house, where much of the garden is also  of my composing, and living with it on a daily basis, I’ve come to appreciate the subtleties of this view – but I still miss my bridge…

When I heard that the theme for this month’s photo competition at Gardening Gone Wild  was the genius loci, the sense of place, of a garden, it was inevitable that the bridge would be  the focus of my sifting through the archives, looking for my entry.

Besides which, I have long wanted to blog about the bridge… Yet, in searching through my archives – a bit of a hit and miss affair, for my computers have needed to be  reformatted this week and my external drive for photographs is on the blink, and I really don’t have the time to indulge anyway – I saw several photos that made me wonder if the bridge should indeed be the theme. But the bridge it is.

Several qualities define the many photos. They reflect the seasons, or the quality of the light, or the reflective quality of water.

Few of them contain strong structural shapes other than the bridge.

Some zoom right in on the bridge, or even just parts of it.

Others are photostitched panoramas which cover an impossibly wide angle in trying to capture the moment.

There are scenes from inside the house…

…and even scenes without the bridge

Yes – as in without the bridge… this scene from the mid-nineties is positively naked!

Light, colour and reflection are definitely the key triggers that make me reach for my camera. But which of the many images captures the genius loci – and why? Is it this dramatic autumn shot, as warm sunlight on hot colours meets subzero blue light on frosted grey foliage?

Is it the beauty of autumn with its unbelievably rich colours that really captures the spirit of my garden?

Or is it in the stark geometry of the winter garden that the true beauty lies? Does the removal of all colour in fact bring forth the truth – the opposite of an autumn view?

Is the power of a summer storm more telling than a wispy dawn?

The big picture or the telling detail?

And finally it is the telling detail which wins the day. Not the framing of the bridge by the white hydrangeas. Nor the touch of colour from the beautiful indigenous pink River Lily, Schizostylis coccinea. It is the breath of wind which stirs the perfect calm of the reflection, the reminder that the exquisite counterview is the sum of a series of random events in nature, and that the truest beauty in a garden is never the work of a human hand, and never lasts for long.

This last shot, one I have treasured for years, captures the genius loci, the spirit of my garden, like no other. It is not chocolate boxy, or even pretty. It is above all serene and expansive. Which is how I’d like to think of my garden. This then is my entry into the competition at Gardening Gone Wild. You can see all the entries here and learn more about this month’s competion here.

 

WEEKLY PIC – OCTOBER10 WEEK3

How to begin to share a mid-October walk in the garden with you… especially as I’ve not had too much opportunity this last week to enjoy it, so there were endless unexpected surprises this Saturday afternoon: roses coming on, irises in bloom, late azaleas – and leaves leaves leaves. But the winning shot was obvious. This set-piece view from The House that Jack Built was originally designed to be seen for as long as possible in the fading light on my few visits to the cottage when I still lived in Johannesburg. It was rather nice to chance upon it suddenly, rather than watch it come slowly to fruition as I did for several years whilst living permanently in the cottage. And last year I think it passed me by entirely: this was the last week of the seven week vigil by my mother’s side.

 

MEMORIES OF LIVING ON THE WATER

I have been feeling disconnected from my farm and my garden of late, and I can’t help thinking it is the result of seven months away from the view out the huge 3m x 3m (10 x 10 ft) window of The house that Jack Built. I dream of one-day-when-I’ve-got-my-life-in-order going down there between guests and waking up to the view, lingering over morning coffee and … Taking a holiday at the bottom of my own garden, so to speak…

 The longing has been reinforced of late by looking at many ‘best of 2006’  pics, and it is from there that I have selected these. To begin with, a photo which gives some idea of my vantage point for many of these photos: often they are taken leaning out through the big window or from just outside the house.

 Mid- June here, and serendipitously this swamp cypress stays green long after all other trees have shed their leaves. The tracery of branches reflected in the water and the openness of the ground beneath the trees mark the clarity of the winter.

 Six months separate these two shots; ‘shades of green’ is the name for the garden that flashes through my head at this season. But it really does sound pretentious… so last year I checked what it would be in Sepedi, the local African language: “Mebalabala ya Botala – Many colours of green.” Perhaps more romantic to some, but even more pretentious as a name!

 Leaning out of the window to the right on a frosty autumn morning. Cold nights and hot, sunny days are the perfect recipe for intense autumn colour, provided here mainly by Acer palmatum, Liquodamber styracifolia and flowering cherry.

 We are three weeks shy of four years since I took this photo, the caption tells me… I detect blossoms and a wiff of spring!

 First light across the water was what I lived for – whether from my bed in the sleeping loft in summer or over coffee and in front of the heater in winter. Can you blame me for feeling a little lost?

 Coffee, and a heater, anyone?

 Or perhaps afternoon tea whilst we wait for the storm to pass?

 On the other hand – if you come in spring a glass of champagne might be more in keeping with the celebratory mood…

 

TAUPE AND TAWNY – OR WINTER’S GRUNGE?

Between late afternoon and dusk I take a walk – and whereas on other days the drabness has depressed me, today its subtlety has filled me with joy. So I concentrate on capturing the colours of deepest winter in my photographs…

The last photo first – deep dusk on the stones of the path at the Cottage Garden

The Beech Borders first draw my attention to the photogenic nature of the theme…

The Beech Tree and seat, backed by a semi-circular hedge of witchazel and lime

Then the seat, and the textures in the composition keep me busy – meanwhile the dogs are ratting in the tall grass behind me, unconcerned that the walk is interrupted.

 I could of course claim that the colour scheme is considered and deliberate…

How could I a few days ago have found this sight depressing?

 A carpet of leaves, evenly strewn, and soft light – a glow…

And nestling in this season’s death lies next season’s birth.

 Beech buds seem to hold more promise than most other trees…

And the promise is reinforced by the spiraeas, sporting minute flowers even before all autumn leaves are shed.

 Each flower no more than 3mm 1/8in across

Whereas the memory of summer’s flowers are… well… faded…

 Verbena bonariensis’s tiny but intense purple flowers produce plentiful seed

…Some less so than others…

 Everlastings never quite lose their colour, the remnants of summer’s gold hidden in winter’s amber.

A lone grass seedhead sways  over the last leaves of the water lilies.

  Survivor of mower and marauder, strimmer and scythe…

The light off the Makou Dam is cold as moonlight.

 And earlier in the week we saw four otters play in the water

Browns seem to be plated in silver…

 Bracken leaf near the Makou  Dam

 In the arboretum the hydrangeas which once marched up the hill in blues and whites under a canopy of tulip trees now wear neutral fatigues.

  Though even now their colour contributes drama …

Witchazel is Old Gold in the gloom – highlight rather than colour.And  the leaves are the richest deep brown.

 

Texture is all…

Seeds and branches 

…And Mateczka’s colouring fits in perfectly.

 Here she is among the Swamp Cypresses at the far fountain.

Bark detailing becomes prominent, and the thin layer of fallen leaves and twigs contrast with the water in the stream.

 The darkest of the Japanese maples has quite a different winter charm.

Nearby the most dramatically wintery of our many tree ferns salute passersby.

 Almost evergreen in a frost-free climate, ours are decidedly seasonal!

Below I played with a different format – do you know how much purple there is in these browns!

Have I mentioned texture before…

Bench and stump in Quercus Corner; a good rest in the furthest corner of the garden.

 Heading back towards the House that Jack Built I photograph the hydrangeas along Oak Avenue.

 Is this what I really saw, or is the camera becoming creative with the available light? Fact is, the hydrangeas under the verticals of the trees made for an impressive composition…

Finally – well, near finally, for from here we move back to my first photo – we see the view from The House that Jack Built…

I have always called the bridge the icon of my garden – and for the first time in years the half-moon meadow is cleared and echoes the curve of the bridge.

 

SOON THE SOLSTICE MOON

Soon the solstice moon will be full. I shall be in Johannesburg, not here to see it. More’s the pity. Somehow the solstice and equinox full moons have always meant more to me than the events themselves… perhaps literally it is the turning of the tides, even though I sit at 1400m (4500ft) and 300km from the closest sea, and over 1000 miles away from the sea I know and love…

In the above photo, taken from the arboretum at 5.30 this afternoon in the growing dusk, you can see the Big House and to its left Trailertrash Cottage.

 I love winter. (Mostly. Last night it depressed me.) I particularly love this view in winter, the view from The House that Jack Built’s big window. (More or less – this was taken from the terrace under the Water Oak.) The traceries of trees are reflected in the water, some late colour coming from a swamp cypress, and for the rest the palette is reduced to dark greens and neutrals. The angles of the earth, overlaid all summer, support the vertical trunks of trees. Light and frost will now play on these surfaces, and I will only tire of them at the end of August, when all starts to change anyway.

This afternoon the dogs and I went on a walk, our first real walk in 12 days. We took along my new camera to test especially its low light potential. We were not disappointed. Whilst on Samaria one of the plates connecting the batteries on the old camera was irretrievably lost in the dust. It will take weeks in Johannesburg to repair. I thought a cheap and compact  point-and-shoot was the solution – one which could take low-light snapshots in a way my bulky 12x zoom (and rather ancient) Canon S2 can not. I bought the entry level Canon A490 and took it on its first real outing…

This photo, taken in the gloom of the steps up from the bridge – always a difficult place to get enough light – proves that it was a worthwhile choice. Besides having a much shorter lens which lets through more light, the camera  can go up to ISO 1600, 4x as much as the old S2. This I think was taken on ISO 800, but strangely it is not indicated in the properties of the photo.

 Here is The House that Jack Built in its meadow, and beyond Freddie’s Dam with the bridge visible over the left side of the cottage… a stone cottage in a meadow on a dam in a valley on a mountain…

 

This photo of Mateczka – now seven months old and a lovely animal – is clearly shot at high ISOs, and there is no detail to her fur. But it is the kind of snapshot I would never have got in the poor light with the S2, and a rather lovely snapshot it makes. I look forward to less self-conscious photography with the new camera!

 

 

 Here is The House that Jack Built as seen from the bridge. With a little imagination you can see the moon reflected in the right hand gap between the trees. I could see it clearly, but you will have to accept my word on that one!

Silver-grey fur can be both a memory of glories past and a promise of beauty to come… wisteria seedpods and magnolia buds.

 And purple-grey is a highly fashionable colour, although my mother lovingly and simply referred to these flowers as ‘Old-fashioneds’ – aged Salvia leucantha finds a new subtlety after the frost…

 We spend a happy hour or more in the garden; Mateczka dashing through fallen leaves with all the joyful indulgence of the young when making a noise, Taubie and Stompie – our two old ladies – plodding along contentedly, and Monty (who believes himself the alpha-male of the valley despite his six-inch legs) dashing off to investigate before running back and jumping up against me adoringly. 

And thus, as the chill becomes more and more noticeable,  we reach home and heat…

 

HOORAH FOR HYDRANGEAS part 1

I promised a walk around my hydrangeas, so let’s set off… Under the oaks on Oak Avenue, near my stone cottage, there are many mopheads in shades of blue.

Because of my acid soil, blues are particularly good and I have shades from pale through powder to rich dark blue. A particular favourite is almost turquoise, an amazing colour in a plant. Those with a mauvish tinge would be pinker, even pure pink in alkaline soil.

 

After last week’s sunny hydrangeas, let me stress that these are planted under a dense but high canopy of pin oaks and gnarled Ouhout  trees, with little direct sun ever reaching them except in the early morning. 

There are several areas in the garden where hydrangeas play an important role, and we will stop to look at a few of them. The white hydrangeas across Freddy’s Dam were picked to show right until the last light and to reflect in the water. It is time I clear a little under the flowering cherries and lift the canopy, for the depth of white in under the trees is all but lost. On the other hand I love the denseness when you cross the bridge and climb up the sheltered path where foliage meets overhead…

Here they are again, seen from the bridge today, the ripples caused by Taubie dog taking a swim in the heat. In the foreground are several shades of Schizostylis coccinea, which is usually scarlet as the name implies. The scarlet species form grows wild on the farm, but these were planted.

The white can be absolutely pure, but it is never so for long. The immature blooms are greenish, as they mature they often get a blue cast, and as they are splattered with rain and start to age, first pink and then wonderfully rich wine-red and blue metallic colourations (that’s the only word for them!) appear. The pinking has started on some of the older and more exposed blooms in the previous photograph, and the masthead shows you what they look like by late April, 3 months hence.

One of the most satisfying gardening afternoons I’ve ever had was after a particularly frustrating day at school. I went home and instead of marking, threw two massive axes out into the garden. I had thought about it for long, but the sheer scale of the planning was exhilarating. The first follows the contour from below the Rosemary Borders and in the opposite direction towards the beech above the Beech Borders. The second runs perpendicular to it from the beech across the contour, through the Beech Borders, across the lily pond and then cuts through a stand of young poplars on the opposite slope, across a sweep of blue hydrangeas and onto an Acer saccharinum and beyond across the arboritum to the conifer planted by my mother at the official planting of the arboritum on my birthday in 1988. So many serendipitous placings came together on that day, some of which I had planned over years, others which were pure chance.

It took several years after old Frans planted the hydrangeas for them to make a show, and there was plenty of weeding to be done in the early days, but he kept at it, and for the past two years these hydrangeas have been of my favourite incidents in the garden.

Here they are again, this time from the other side, where one comes upon them suddenly in their gap among the poplars…

 

Here they are again, for I couldn’t resist including this photograph, taken this afternoon. And now, although we are not yet halfway through the walk, I think it is time to take a rest, and to continue our explorations later…

PS: This is my first post written using Windows Live Writer – thanks to our great guru and friend from Blotanical,  Jean from Jean’s Garden. The only problem was loading what was a rather large file through my iffy internet, more than made up for by the slickness of composing without the irritation of uploading. And I love being able to chose my font, the borders and the watermark. Now it is only the narrowness of the blog which irritates me – but try looking at it at 125% magnification!

 

 

WEEKLY PIC: JAN10 -WEEK 1

SUNRISE ON A NEW DECADE

and may it be a wonderful year!

 

WEEKLY PIC: NOVEMBER WEEK 5

My first sight as I woke this morning: the icon of my garden, the bridge, washed in the clean early sunlight of a summer morning after rain. Woken by the Piet-my-vrou cuckoo calling anxiously for his wife. “Peat may frow” – Pete my wife. Why his wife has a man’s name, and where she’s got to that he has to call for her so incessantly through the heat of summer has worried me since I was a little boy,  but I don’t think he trusts her in the balmy holiday weather of high summer…

 

WEEKLY PIC: NOVEMBER WEEK 4

This is the view from my home. What justifies its  choice as the pic of the week is that after 120mm of rain (5 in) the last two days, it is the only shot I got from my non-waterproof camera. Jokes aside, as the colourful early summer settles into the lush green growth of high summer, the rain often dictates the nature of our activities: potting-on in the carport today, for instance. And the view from inside of rain on the water – now much browner than before – of  branches hanging heavy with moisture, of the bridge darkly wet and  the first hydrangeas ghostly in the gloom is a standard November week 3 image. And that after all is the purpose of this series.; a chronicle of a year in the garden with 52 pictures.

 

More and more to see as spring kicks in!

I always say that early spring is schizo around here – all colour and no green. Bleached by winter cold and drought, grasses are blonde and trees are grey. Suddenly colour arrives like a rash on the first azaleas: one looks at it in fascination and surprise. Of course the first blossoms on the trees are magnificent, and of course – almost grudgingly - I get pleasure from those first azaleas, but it is only a few weeks later when the many trees start pushing young leaves that spring becomes overwhelmingly beautiful to me!

The pictures above – a view and two details – I took yesterday from the veranda of the big house.  As I’ve been living there since early September rather than in my own house due to my mom’s health, I’ve been able to observe the daily – make that hourly as the light shifts! – changes that make this view so rewarding. Here for instance is a view on the 13th, when suddenly the afternoon backlighting caught the young leaves on the first of the oaks to green up. It gives some idea of how much changes in two weeks!

The view from my house has been the subject of a few shots too: I do get to take the occasional walk, and my dogs sleep at home and so get let out every morning at ‘photo time’!  This is the one month in the year when I consider giving the bridge a fresh wash of white – surrounded as it is by flowering cherries and almonds, azaleas and Viburnum plicatum, it seems a little drab. For the rest of the year I like its ‘dull white’ look.

Here is another shot of the icon of my garden, taken a few days earlier from my front door. The bowl of scented freesias stands on the stone plinth in line with the bay window. In our sheltered valley reflections are often near perfect.

This early morning view shows the quality of the reflection and the greening of the trees across from my home; the centre of the view from my big bay winow is in line with the left edge of the photo.

To continue the theme of greening (or in this case reddening – or wining?), this opposite view from the above one, taken nine days earlier, shows the first silvery brown leaves on the Acer palmatum atropurpureum. The grass of the meadow which only days before waved between the house and the water, has been cut and the dogwood (Cornus florida) in the right foreground is flowering properly for the first time this year. I grew it from seed off my own trees!

To end off, a view up from Alfred’s Arches to the big house. One morning one wakes up to a garden that is no longer wintery; Erigeron karvinskianus with its white daisy flowers from pink buds self-seeds most beautifully all around my garden and contributes hugely to the blowsy, accidental overlay of the formality which I so love. Down the steps to meet me comes Doubly, the Border Collie.