My Garden

Our flower-filled organic country flower garden plays host to all my Fairy Workshops and often I hold the weekly spiritual development classes there too. It is loaded full of flowers, fairies, butterflies, free range bantams and native birds. An ideal and peaceful place to learn more about the spiritual aspects of nature. The Spring months of October and November are particularly beautiful ideal and flower-filled time to come to one of our workshops.

I am also garden writer and write about my garden and garden adventures in all my spiritual gardening books.

I love colour and I love flowers and old fashioned fragrant flowers in particular, like vintage roses, lilac, iris, carnations, sweet peas, freesias etc. I also love pets and animals and wildlife and have lots of bees and butterflies and unusual and pretty Australian birds frequent our garden. It is gardening really in the cottage garden style because I love all things romantic and cottagey. I am half Welsh so perhaps that explains my love for pretty cottage style things. So I suppose my garden could be described as an Australian cottage garden.

I use lots of Mediterranean climate flowering plants and attractive flowering Australian natives, like purple flowered emu bushes and Alyogyne purple hibiscuses. I have collections of bearded irises that flower all October. Old fashioned vintage and modern shrub roses that flower in November along with a lovely collection of flowering garden pelargoniums and salvias.

Our climate is typically Mediterranean with cold wet winter and spring rains and hot dry summers and autumns. To give you a point of comparison countries with a similar climate are Southern Greece and Southern Italy, Southern France, Turkey, Southern Spain, California, and South Africa. I live in country South Australia, where the climate is quite temperate and is comfortable to garden in all year long. The garden flowers profusely when it rains so from the start of the rains in say late autumn and when the day temperatures cool down a little the flowers come back en-masse from May to December, Late autumn to Summer we have continuous flowers. Then it has a brief respite in January, Feb in the high summer when it is quite hot and dry, I garden here in the cool mornings and evenings and stay out of the midday sun.

Australian native plants provide hardy and beautiful colours in the back of the garden beds. Here we have a purple native hibiscus Alyogyne huegelii and an Eremphila nivea in full flight, my favourite eremophilia (emu bush)!

I started the garden more or less from scratch. There were some previous fruit trees and driveway native trees and a woodlot planted by previous owners. There were no nice garden plants apart from a few lavenders, an oleander and a Persian lilac and a flowering quince shrub. So I had to start everything from scratch, I have enjoyed immensely creating a garden here that suits our climate. Working with an empty but good area to grow lots of my favourite garden plants.

In high spring the combination of hardy Australian native and Mediterranean climate perennials and sub shrubs form the backdrop of the garden. Here we have native hibiscus, Osteopermums, marguerite daisies and Statice perezzi. I love the combinations of purple and white a highly spiritual colour combination.

I like to grow lots of edibles with tomatoes, cucumber, zucchini, pumpkins, watermelon lettuce and parsley and herbs in summer depending on how well I set it up in early spring. I also like to grow lots of organic fruit and we are lucky enough to be warm enough to grow all the citrus varieties as well as all the pome and stone fruits, peaches, pears, apples and plums. Plus we are cold enough in winter to allow a good fruit set of fruit such as apricots and cherries, providing seasonal treats. I have set up a new garden area in the last 3 years that includes many of these fruit treats.

Our vegetable garden a few years ago with zucchinis, tomatoes, leeks, rocket and carrots.

Also sadly it is quite an environmentally degraded area. I live in typical sheep and grain farming country. This particular area was stripped of almost every, last tree, shrub and groundcover by over judicious clearing and clearing trees to make a crust (sold for firewood to the local copper mines) in the 1890s when there was a drought for farmers. So this degraded and sullied land has given me a unique insight into the problems regarding bringing the land and the wildlife back from the brink of extinction.

I have planted lots of native trees and shrubs back on my small acreage to bring back some of the balance of nature. To provide a wildlife corridor for visiting birds, butterflies and kangaroos etc. Also to stop wind and water erosion of the precious yet thin topsoils typical in Australia.