A Fresh Perspective

Recently on Instagram I shared a photo looking out my kitchen window. Fairly innocuous, simple, nothing too exciting there – but it garnered a few comments that people had never seen that view before. Huh. A view I spend a lot of time looking at, which is probably why I ‘overlook’ it so often and dismiss my surroundings as nothing special. So this morning I pushed Eleanor around the garden in the rare snippets of sunshine and tried to look differently at our little patch here at Brindabella. From a fresh perspective, through somebody else’s eyes trying to get our bearings around the grounds…

There’s the backyard, with the path to the back porch and the big old horse chestnut tree. We have planted more Avonview lavender along the path to create a little hedge border. On the weekend we also planted some ‘filler’ plants to, well, fill the sparse bed out with perennial shrubs: federation daisy, a sweet smelling daphne and a special variety of azalea we selected especially to plant this Winter: ‘Little Girl’. A Star Jasmine and a Happy Wanderer have also been planted to climb up the fence eventually.

Also in the backyard is our big main garden bed, which once upon a time was half the size with the original yard fence straight through it, which we removed in 2011 when we made the yard bigger. This bed used to have some established camellias in it which unfortunately weren’t pruned or maintained properly and fell over. I have grand plans of a rambling cottage garden in here, slowly getting there with some Spring bulbs, lambs ear, lavender, chrysanthemum, salvia and hellebores.

On the eastern side of the house is the ‘original’ plantings of the garden, remnants from the family who built this home and lived here before us. There’s a few established camellias, a rhododendron and trees up the driveway (including a smaller version of our huge horse chestnut tree that’s in the backyard) as well as a bed of westringias we planted in 2011 when we used to live here. I have planted hydrangeas in the garden bed next to the house, willing them to grow big and strong coming into Spring!

When we first moved in here, the western side of the house was just paddock – actually it was a mess. We spent every weekend for a year cleaning up that area so we could create this new bigger lawn area. Once there were 17 cypress trees standing here, some falling down outbuildings we demolished, so much rubbish, as well as a whole lot of roots from the trees, rocks (oh the rocks I had to pick up before Matt could hoe this area with the tractor!) and general debris. Fast forward three years and it looks a little like this…

Our very own footy pitch! Well, almost. It’s an enormous area, true – but if ever you added on to the house I imagined you would build out this way, and I would eventually like to have a lot more garden beds along the fence and carport wall. The poor camellia at the front corner of our house I am waiting to prune once it’s finished flowering, it’s so very lopsided! Out in this western side of the house we planted several trees: a Chinese pistachio, magnolia and my favourite Manchurian pear down towards the front of the house…

Now I am pushing our little girl around the garden in her pram telling her how Mummy and Daddy planted these trees well before she was born, before we were married actually, before so many things. Bella stands guard by her always, inquisitive and protective of her little charge. She’s such a good girl, both of them actually. It never ceases to astound me how serendipitous our move home here has been, welcoming Eleanor to the home we always thought we would. Astounds me, but then doesn’t all at once.

Looking at our little patch from a fresh perspective might have been just what the doctor ordered, I thought as we trundled up the muddy driveway headed for the chook pen to collect the eggs…