Rain, rain go away

This week feels like a bit of a bust because of the weather!

What I am obsessed with this week

We have started taking photos of various parts of the garden, and talking about what would make those areas look substantially better. This has been quite fun because it has been paired with the new art class I’m taking with my 15yr old (shout out to South Coast Studio in Owhiro Bay). Most of what makes a painting look accurate, or seem real, or vaguely ‘good,’ is similar to landscaping! It’s good to use photos to do this, because photos are the worst critic of a garden- a phone camera takes out all of the depth so things look so much more hectic.

This week some of the things we talked about were-

• People will only see about 20% of the detail in a garden, so the 80% has to simply not look like a giant green blob.

• We do this by making sure the plants aren’t all growing into each other, and the plants which look best when carefully inspected (tiny flowers, tiny details) are right up front where they are not seen as vague blurs; the plants toward the back should be a couple of different shades so they don’t all look like one thing (unless that is specifically something you are going for)… another option is putting really bold leaved/flowers at the back (like the fern below, or a puka with huge leaves, or sunflowers) where the eye will be drawn to that detail.

There are a lot of ‘good’ plants in there, but because they are so tiny in leaf shape, don’t match and are leggy, it just looks like a mess. So in this case we would either keep the coprosma and plant more (smaller leaved thing on the far right) or plant more ferns (like the one on the far left). Obviously the fern is the most striking here.

Here the balance is good, the colours are all a bit different, the rosemary totally changes colour when in flower because there are so many so that provides interest. And we have planted groundcovers and removed the hydrocotyl, for the beady eyed people! But the hydrocotyl doesn’t look half bad there!

It’s a bit of fun, really.

More bulbil talk

After my blog about bulbils, I keep coming across them everywhere! Here are a few-

Here’s a bulbil I found off an enormous aloe on the weekend

Here’s a bulbil from the head of an enormous umbrella sedge

I’m going to head off and get soaking wet again, so apologies for the scarcity of information this week! Have a good week, everyone.