Sprangles

The front garden of our house was nice and neat when we bought it, but clearly circa 1983 with it’s conifers and date palms.

Date palms have giant spikes that are really painful to bump against, so they were the first thing to go — we had a guy come in and remove them (incidentally, the guy has a colleague who spent 6 weeks in hospital after getting spiked by a date palm and getting the wound infected!).

Our first constructive addition was to add a jacaranda tree out the front. When we planted the tree it was only a stick about 1.5m tall. We took some photos on the day we planted it, but unfortunately I lost those photos in a hard drive failure.

The main feature of the front garden was a big area of lawn that sucked up a lot of water and was a lot of maintenance, so that had to go. As soon as Lana would let me I sprayed it with Zero and then dug it up with a big mechanical rotary hoe.

The thin stick directly behind me in that photo is the new jacaranda tree. Ripping up the lawn was a lot of fun, but it left the garden looking like a disaster zone.

Here’s a map of the front garden as it was, and how we’re changing it — rollover the image to see the new plan (you might need to wait a few seconds for the new plan to load).

The main things we’re doing:

• I’m taking all the pavers from the old path and laying them across the very front of the yard. The paving is an improvement for two reasons:
  1. The postman used to ride his motorbike across the old lawn, and because he rode the same path every time there was a depressed dead line in the grass. Now he’s got a nice paved surface to ride across.
  2. The paving also provides a good place for putting out the bins for weekly collection.
• We’re having the driveway widened by a couple of feet for most of its length. The current driveway is only just wide enough for a car, so when people stop on it they step out into the garden. So this change is just for our visitors!
• Obviously the lawn is going, and we’re replacing it with a winding path through the garden. The path is deliberately winding so that people walking it will be able to see all of the garden. It’s bordered by big moss rocks that we’re getting from Soils Ain’t Soils.
• We’re putting in a great big pond in the middle of the garden that will overflow and flow down the old steps into another pond at the bottom of the steps. I’ll be covering the steps with moss rocks, so hopefully the water feature will look relatively natural.
• We’re bordering the side of the pond that’s not near the path with water-loving plants and reeds, so hopefully we can get a natural looking pond plenty of wildlife.
• I’ll be building a little footbridge over the pond to complete the path. Yay! A bridge!
• To keep the water flowing we’ll need to pump water from the bottom pond up to the top pond. The plan there is to position a big ceramic bowl in the top pond above the water level, and to pump the water into that. It’ll flow over the edge of the bowl, into the top pond, down the water fall and into the bottom pond. The plan is to grow water lilies in the bowl to make it a real feature, and to stop the water lilies taking over the pond.
• The old letterbox was a very low brick box with a small opening. It was really hard to get the mail out of it and it was full of snails, so I destroyed it. One of the last things I’ll be doing in the front yard is building a new letterbox, but for the meantime we’ve got a $10 stand-in.

The rocks for the garden edging we sourced from Soils Ain’t Soils. It’s $100 for a trailerload, which is a pretty good deal considering how high we stacked the trailer. It was hard work though.

After sorting out the old reticulation we laid a bunch of stones for edges, and the garden started to take shape.

I put down reticulation between the soil and the mulch, which means we’ll use a lot less water keeping the front garden well-watered. It’s not quite the same as the stuff I used in the back garden, but it works the same way (and is a lot cheaper).

We laid out some of the old garden edging to mark out the new pond, but in this shot I haven’t started digging the pond yet:

Having completed one side of the garden bed we went to Trees-A-Green (our local discount plant wholesaler — way cheaper than Bunnings) and bought a whole bunch of plants to get the garden started. We’ve elected to go with large areas of the same plant rather than a whole bunch of different plants, it should be easier to maintain that way, and it’ll look a lot better. Here’s Lana excitedly putting plants in the ground:

The new paving I laid across the front of the block is in the foreground, and Lana is standing on what will be the new path. Just in front of her the thin stick is our jacaranda tree — it’s slowly growing. The white letterbox is a temporary one that I’ll be replacing with a masterpiece once the front yard is complete.

We had the driveway widened a couple of feet so that people can park on the driveway and get out of their cars without falling into the garden.

The retaining wall that ends at the side of the driveway had to be extended up along the edge of the driveway, and also raised by a couple of courses. I really don’t like laying bricks (it’s a lot of hard work) but it’s quite satisfying when it’s done.

I’ll be rendering over the top of them, so I didn’t bother making the mortar particularly neat. You can also see in that photo that I’ve built wooden surrounds for the two garden beds next to the front door — I’m very happy they’re in place, since they’ll keep the garden beds and the paving separate: it really annoys me when dirt from the garden ends up on the paths and ends up being walked inside.

After rendering over the top of the bricks the retaining wall looks a lot better:

View all the photos of the front garden project.