Our Place
A great deal of planning, muscle, time and much argument goes into making our house a home.
When we bought the place it had been empty for a year or so and
unkempt for long before that so it took many months to clear the
rubbish and tidy the house yard to start planning a garden. The tall
dry weeds had taken over and only a few very hardy garden plants had
survived amongst it all. We stripped back the jungle of weeds to expose
original garden beds edged by struggling would be lawn grass.
The paddocks were mostly cleared and we found a few plants that had
been evicted from the garden, possibly presumed dead and tossed away
into the paddock. There they had been lucky enough to catch the right
conditions, taken root and had grown into small splashes of colourful
life in the sparse, rough ground. A coastal rosemary, three lavender
and even a rose bush were reclaimed from the cracks of hard clay and
returned to the sanctuary of what was become our front garden. Under a
stand of gum trees we found a clump of daisy bushes spreading as far as
the protection of dappled shade would allow and so we stole some to
plant in the garden beds near the house gate.
A previous tenant had been capturing wild goats from up north and
keeping them on the paddocks. Maddened by captivity, full of worms and
starving, they would push their heads through the fence in search of
nourishment and become entrapped, caught behind their horns. They lived
wild and unchecked for weeks at a time so we discovered many goat
skeletons laying where they had died waiting to be released from their
wire prison.