Gardening For Non-Gardeners

I can appreciate a great garden as much as the next person, in fact I come from a long line of mad keen gardeners, both ornamental and fruit/veg. My Great Grandparents and Grandparents had great gardens. My Mother and Father could also stick something in the ground and it would bloom... My Aunt's garden was also manicured to within an inch of it's life. I however, have an amazing knack of being able to kill everything except weeds lol

Sulfur Crested Cockatoo's eating seed in my Aunt's garden.

There are two things that I have not been able to kill..... Not that I've tried to kill them lol In our previous house, I planted heaps of roses because they suited the style of house. Now I'd heard that roses were finicky, but I thought I'd give it a shot.... I was amazed! In the years that we lived there, not one of them died! I also planted camellias, simply because I liked them, and surprisingly they didn't die either.

These are outside our bedroom window.

So you can imagine how stoked I was when we bought the house we live in now, and I noticed that the previous owner had planted camellias. Straight away I knew that we would have something, that would grow with little maintenance :o) As I am more of a 'plant it and leave it' kind of person. In the past I have gone down the path of tending to plants, and feeding them etc.... I still killed them. So now I'm a low maintenance - plant kind of person. 

Also outside our bedroom window.

Unfortunately the previous owner only planted camellias in the front yard. She actually planted something of a jungle in the backyard.... Which just seems plain odd, considering that we have an in-ground pool..... So every time the wind blows, the pool fills up with all kinds of leaves, sticks and berries.

Spike - our youngest kitty having a snooze under the camellias.

After I finish painting inside the house, the backyard is my next project, and Oh My God.... It's going to be a big one! It will be the kind of job where a skip bin will need to be hired and the chainsaw will be going at full force all day! I'm looking forward to the jungle being cleared out.... But I'm not so sure that I'm looking forward to the massive mess that it's going to make. I haven't got a photo to show you of the backyard, but just imagine a whole load of out of control trees and bushes..... Because that's what it looks like. It's the kind of yard, that when I do start, I'm not going to be sure of where to begin.

Once the jungle is gone I will be planting low maintenance plants that are also tolerant to salt, as our pool is saltwater and many plants just don't like salt. At the moment I'm thinking along the lines of clumping black bamboo along the back fence, with smaller plants, such as strappy red grasses layered in front. I just love black bamboo, and I think the jet black with the bright green leaves combined with red grasses will look quite striking. 

I still have quite a bit of research to do, as I don't want to plant the wrong plants and then have to do it all over again. I also don't want to plant items that will lose a lot of leaves which will end up in the pool. We actually have quite a small backyard, and most of it is pool - entertaining area. So the garden needs to be compact and - or tall, which is why I initially had the bamboo idea in mind, as it will give us privacy from the neighbours at the rear due to it's height, and it also loses leaves gradually - not all at once like a deciduous plant, which will make both me and the pool happy :o)