My Creative Inspiration: My Garden

With all the racket going on in my house with our bathroom renovation, (and now that that is over -our flood damage clean up) I had no choice  but to park myself outside.

And of course it wasn’t long before relaxing in the garden,  turned in to watering this plant, fertilizing that one, or even pulling weeds.

As I write this post, it has started to rain again, which of course heightens the colors and makes them pop. I have to say it is almost as pretty as when the sun was shining.

Now, I love the outdoors, but when your garden is a mess, an absolute wreck, it is not that easy to look at.  It becomes an overwhelming task that makes you want to turn your cheek and escape it;  to jump on your bicycle and ride away or go for a walk or hop in the car and enjoy the long drive to the mountains, just so you can escape it.

Spending any time in it, changes from something relaxing to, simply an impossible task, another mountain to climb in your long adventure.

Then April arrived and I was forced to get outside and get working in the garden as our bathroom renovation began and now with the flood , we have had to move around our house so there is virtually no free space anywhere and often no clean space.

It is bad, but until the work starts to professionally dry, our floors and what is under our floors, everything will at least remain in somewhat of a disarray.

Until then, I plan to concentrate as much of my efforts as possible on my garden.

Last year, with the way we planned our holidays, our garden ended up in a bit of a wreck, so this year I want to try to prevent that.

Rather than the overwhelming weed control, I have started with flower control. Maintenance of our previously existing perennials which are consistent bloomers.

My mother in law, Gaby planted many of these and I have made some additions over the years, but my garden doesn’t  meet my expectations. Really I have the bones of a beautiful garden, but it needs a lot of work.

With all this inspiration, I have had a lot of ideas as to what I want to do with my garden this month, this summer and this year, and even some ideas for the future.

This summer I would like to concentrate my efforts on improving our privacy.

Most of the trees towards the forest have created a lovely buffer from the road to the back of our property, but the side road, the main road is almost wide open, except for a very ugly fence and a very ugly, very prickly bush, which doesn’t fulfil it’s purpose of improving privacy.

The photo above is off to the side, on the back road. We are very overlooked, from all sides.

The pond is one of my favorite places to spend time in in the garden. It is shady and cool, when the pump on the water feature is functioning properly I love to listen to the sound of the water falling and splashing down the stones. I love it all, especially lit up in the night time. I love all the creatures it attracts, especially the hedgehogs, which I occasionally see crawling about on the stones at dusk.

Unfortunately, it needs a lot of maintenance right now, being a number of years old. But that is the story of my garden. It is well established and missed it’s fall or spring trimming, so we have got a lot of work cut out for us.

As for being productive, I guess you could say things have been pretty good. After being stored in the garage all through the winter, these cork tree branches have finally lost their dry leaves and after cleaning them off they are ready to be put to work, as decorations in the house.

In the veggie patch things are pretty empty, but we have made the most out of the Rhubarb, which has taken over.

My mother-in-law Gaby and Sandra, a friend,  have been the happy recipients of quite a bit of the one plant. I still have a little left for this harvest.

Gaby made this absolutely delicious Rhubarb cake, with slivers of almonds on a bed of miréngue (Someone have a clue how that is spellt?)

So that ends my garden tour.  I would like to thank all my little helpers for their work out in the garden this week: Sandra, Luca and Mira. I couldn’t have done it without their help.