Updated Shady Garden

It's been a couple of years since I first showed you the landscaping of our shady south facing garden and spa area. I thought you might like to see some more recent photos of the garden, taking during the summer 2016.

Shady garden

Some parts are going great guns, and others have struggled. Most notably was the Magnolia Genie trees. The first one, at the top of the slope, is thriving and is now 3m tall. The middle one completely died (2m from the first) and the bottom one has really struggled. We decided the terrible soil was responsible, so dug a 50cm deep trench, 30cm wide and about 4m long through this area. This was filled with better soil, compost and potting mix. The bottom one hasn't recovered yet, but hopefully once we hit spring will take off. The middle one is completely gone.

I put in some cuttings of the Hydrangea Merville Sanguine, which have hardly done anything besides produce 2 or 3 huge blooms and that's it. The one I bought has done so much better. A lesson there?

I loved the Pieris that I had, though 2 of the 3 also died! I blame the drainage again, so will get some more once they come back into stock and hopefully this time they will do better.

I've added several of the stunning Hydrangea Limelight that you can see in the pictures. They are amazing! They love the sun, unlike the Hydrangea Bridal Bouquet which gets horribly sunburned, even in this south facing garden.

The Japanese Anemones are a bit inconsistent. I have them trying to take over some areas, and then really struggling to get going in others. I plan for them to run along the back of the garden, where it's very dry under the eves.

I've got several different Hellebores now: White Magic which isn't living up to expectations and a gorgeous red which I can't remember right now.

And finally we have added a little red weeping maple under the lounge window. The first time I've ever had a maple. It must be a sheltered spot if that one lasts!

It's nearly time to trim back all the hydrangeas and anemones and tuck things up for the winter now, so goodnight until spring!

Shady garden

Shady garden

The Rose Garden

Gardening really is my favourite hobby. One of the things I most look forward to when the kids go back to school is getting stuck into the garden: dead-heading the roses, trimming up the buxus hedging, weeding out any nasties. It's not everyone's cup of tea, but I find it extremely therapeutic.

We had been enjoying our front patio for about 6 months, but the resulting wasteland that had been left behind in the area adjacent to it (above the small sleeper retaining wall and pergola) was a serious eyesore.

One reason I had left it until last was that it was the one I see from my kitchen window, and so it had to be perfect. Somehow things are so much more perfect in ones mind's eye than in the 'flesh' so I was a bit loath to start. However with the progress in the house in removing the old brick chimney, I had piles of antique bricks just waiting to be used in the pathway that I envisioned would wind down through the colourful cottage garden I would plant either side. The time was now and we all know the middle of winter is the best time to be moving dirt and laying paths...right??

And when I say moving dirt, I mean really moving dirt. Somehow dirt expands. Yes I know it scientific, but it's also a bit magical. We had to relocate quite a bit of dirt in order to level the patio area, and the logical area for this to be dumped is on the next garden to be done. Now it was time to sculpt this.

We marked out a winding path roughly in this, stuck a few pegs in each end in order to string line an approximate level of the path, and began moving dirt.

Piles of dirt!

Potentially a lovely site.

There is a really cool feature in our garden. As you know, it's  on a steep hill side. The patio has a 4m retaining wall below it. At the bottom of this is...well..wasteland. Eventually it will be landscaped (of a sort) but as we all know, the best location for stuff you don't want is, well, the next area. So we bucketed hundreds of buckets of clay and rubbish over the patio fence. My boys discovered a colony of snails while helping me, which they had races with and anything else to distract them from helping.

Boys getting distracted with snails...

Slowly the ground smoothed out, we added compost and garden mix and potting mix and whatever bags of soil we had lying around the garden centre that we own. And every single bag had to be carried down three flights of steps to the house. My poor husband.

It got so muddy we had to temporary lay the bricks!

Next, we started in the path. I concreted in the edges, lining up both ends with the adjacent paths, and string lining between to get an even fall, I used a measured piece of timber to ensure the same width all along its length. Following this I laid 3cm of sand, having screwed together another little contraption. The top piece of wood laid across the top of the edge bricks. The next piece of wood, which I screwed to the first, was the gap piece of wood. This was specifically as deep as the bottom of the path bricks would sit. This took into account the fact that the side bricks were on their sides in order to have them sitting about 3cm higher than the path. So, say the bricks were 5cm thick, add the 3cm difference and the gap piece of wood ought to end 8cm below the edges. I screeded the sand and then laid the bricks.

Measuring contraption

This was no easy task. My grandfather had told me not to try a curved brick path. So I made a curved brick path. As I like it rustic, it's part of the charm to have irregular gaps and spacing.

There was one problem: As I like to do things properly, the 1.4m paved path that was already extending into this area had to come out. It didn't match. Cue domestic. Needless to say, I won. I was sick of piles of building materials everywhere, so in the process I sold off a pile of excess bricks. It had been a huge chimney, way too many bricks...

Yep

Not enough bricks. I'd calculated based on my original measurements, before championing the removal of the mis-matched path. So I had to buy 30 more bricks off Trade-me. For more than I sold the 'excess' ones.

Buxus hedge

Perennials added. Roses compulsory.

Early spring

Mid spring

Summer

From patio

All pinks and purples

Nahema

Get rid of that lawn!

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. 

Planting List

Trees:

Olives

Roses: 

Dublin Bay (climbing red floribunda)

Diamond Design (stunning pink-and-white hybrid tea bush)

Love Me Do (gorgeous fragrant cream hybrid tea bush)

Nahema (incredibly fragrant pink climbing floribunda)

Shrubs:

Buxus standard balls

Pittosporum Golf Ball Silver

Acacia Limelight

Perennials:

Lavender With Love (pink)

Miniature agapanthus Sea Foam (white)

Dianthus Memories (white)

Penstemon Swan Lake (white)

Parahebe (white)

Other annuals & bulbs:

Tulip Hermione (pink)

Tulip White Romance (white)

Freesia (white)

Geraniums (pink)

Lobelia (white)

Alyssum (white)

Annie Sloane Ladder in "Florence"

Here's my inspiration: an old painter's ladder picked up off Trademe for $16. As we have 2.8m ceilings, we often need a ladder to reach shelves.

Treatment:

• Wash with Sugar Soap
• Putty up a few old borer holes
• Sand these off
• One coat of Annie Sloane Chalk Paint in "Florence"
• Sand back with 100grit sandpaper, paying especial attention to the centre fronts of treads and outer edges where they would naturally wear the most. This will expose the original paint drips.
• Wax roughly with Annie Sloane Clear Wax, one area at a time
• Follow this immediately in each area with Annie Sloane Dark Wax
• Buff until glowing

Here's the result.

Multifunction Room

143m2 isn't that small, is it? What about for a family of five? I didn't think so...before we tried living in it. One of those five is taller than me, another is the same height, and a third is not far behind. Only one is still a respectably small size. 

It's not just their size that causes complication in a smallish house. It's the stuff that goes with them. Yes, I admit we no longer have ride-on motorbikes, lego strewn across the floor, pens pencils and crayons covering tables, and blocks lying in wait for bare feet to tread on. Life has moved on somewhat. Now we are contending with infinity number of balls - rugby balls, soccer balls, netballs, basket balls, hockey balls, tennis balls, and whatever other kind of ball it is possible for a kid to own and use constantly under my feet. But what is worse is that even more often these balls are being bounced, hit, smacked, pushed, kicked and whacked inside my house. It's just a matter of time...

Initially, when we bought this house two years ago, I thought 143m2 meant less cleaning, less clutter, going along with the current trends of decluttering, reducing, only keeping what you love and can't live without. 

I was wrong. 

A smaller house means more cleaning as the dirt is still there, it's just condensed into a smaller space! It means incredible organisation...either that or just giving up (on seeing any horizontal spaces) for the next ten-odd years. I chose the organisation for the moment. Sometimes I change my mind. 

Recently, we've moved on a bit from multiple balls rolling around the floors. We're up to multiple devices cluttering up tables and benches. All my kids need devices for school, plus there are the ones they already had (iPods etc) and then there are also phones as they reach an age where they need one. Along with these come the recharge cables, headphones (so I can't hear their games!), cases etc etc. I have put so much time and consideration into purchasing the storage we need to keep things orderly and in their place, mostly to avoid constantly being asked where something is. However somewhere along the line, a crucial point was missed...

In our house, the dining room is the centre of the house. We usually come in the back door into the laundry, which opens onto the kitchen. Then, to get to all the bedrooms, family room, lounge, bathroom, toilet and front door, you have to go through the dining room. In our last house our dining room was huge, with a vaulted ceiling and two big french doors. We had a beautiful big 8-10 seater dining table with tall black leather chairs which my husband refused to sell on when we moved into this new house. It just never quite sit right in our new house, with it's cute cottage style.

The other big feature in the dining room was a coal range. A previous owner had installed it when this part of the house was added on in the '80s. It was cute, the brick work was very nice, but as a coal range it was just a bit difficult. It wasn't by the kitchen, it was really low so we had to crouch to use it, and coal isn't a local resource here in Wellington. We decided it had to go as space was at such a premium. It sold very quickly on Trademe which was great, but my husband wasn't terribly happy about taking it down the 4 flights of stairs to the road! 

The dining room also had some other nice features, such as a dresser with (fake) lead-light windows on the wall between kitchen and dining, lots of book shelves and cupboard space. But there were some elements that bothered me, such as the a single curtain on one side of the french doors, and the fact that people constantly used the french doors as the front door, leaving bags and shoes piled up on the floor.

Last summer we decided to take out the wall between the kitchen and dining room, which has let a whole lot more light into the dining room as well as warmth into the kitchen. 

 This was the opportunity I needed to get a much-needed office space built into the space that the coal range had previously occupied. I was sure that with some organisation and a spread sheet or two, we could create a functional office 'nook' that would hold all the clutter that was bugging me.

 We lined the back of the office nook with t&g to match the ceilings which were t&g douglas fir painted white. Our builder put in four shelves in good, solid pine, and I built a desk which could fit the lovely carver I had bought and painted under it. Lastly I got hold of a great little metal draw unit to fit under. Now I have no end of space to store every known file box or book, baskets, boxes, pens, pencils, mail, printer, computer, phone, magazines, and even a bunch of photos, quotes, and pictures. 

The room isn't quite finished yet, as we are still waiting for the breakfast bar to finish the transition from dining to kitchen, but I will upload some photos of the drinks trolley, the new curtains, and the piano wall once I get some. We finally have a home for the fabulous world map my sister sent us as a house warming present.