Come stroll through a garden with me

It’s spring here where I live, and it’s traditionally a time for Open Gardens – I don’t know if that’s a thing anywhere else, but in Australia some kind people from time to time open their gardens for total strangers to tramp through. 

We took the girls for a wander on Sunday – we’ve not done it before but it was such a glorious day and we wanted to get them out in the fresh air for a bit.

From the road this house didn’t look all that fantastic – yes it was very neat and tidy but you couldn’t really see what was happening, but as you walked through the gates and around the corner, it was the most magical place!

I took eight thousand photos (or so it seemed) so I will only bore you with a few.  All of these were taken with my phone which did a fantastic job, I think you’ll agree.  My only problem with the phone camera is the light makes it very difficult to see what you are taking a photo of.  Mostly I just clicked and hoped for the best, but really – this garden was so lovely that I don’t think I could have taken a dud photo.

So many pretty things hidden away in every corner, a real ‘Secret Garden’.

We are traditionally a very dry place, there is never enough rain and we are often on water restrictions.  Some of us pay by the litre for our water, which makes life (and gardening) quite expensive, but some of the older, luckier fruit blocks still have access to the river and have an allowance, of sorts.  I don’t begrudge them their allowance, if it means I can wander around such a pretty place.

Some gardeners are very water conscious though – and I suspect these ladies were that type of people – the garden was very clever, lots of shade, lots of water conservation happening. 

Our garden runs on recycled water.  When we built our house, we put a large bio-recycle tank thingie (very technical term) that supplies our garden very nicely, thankyou.  And as we have a very large, old style veranda, we catch most of our rainwater in two massive tanks (when it remembers to rain!).  We still pay much more than we would like to for our quarterly rain bill, but that’s the life of an Aussie person here. 

If you want to start a fight in Australia, start talking about which states deserve the most access to the river systems.  That’ll soon start a punch up.

I hope you enjoyed our little stroll around some one else’s garden.  I hope to have some quilting photos up soon!