nurturing our babies

In our garden, winter is marked by the flowering of our Camellia hedge. 

We first started growing Camellia's in pots when we lived in our old apartment.

You can see them here in the two pots either side of the bench.  Oldest KAT was heading off to school for her orientation in this shot.  That would be seven years ago!  Such an exciting time:)

The Camellias were a burst of colour in our shared courtyard.  As you can imagine, we had limited control over the 'look and feel' of a communal courtyard but I didn't let that deter me...embracing container gardening like a woman possessed!

I cut my gardening teeth nurturing these beauties (the Camellias not the children).

I taught myself how to prune on them.  I learnt that they can handle the heavy-handed treatment meted out by a novice gardener!!

I fertilised them, I transplanted them into bigger pots when they were needing a bit more room.  Somehow the Camellias were telling us that we needed more room too!! 

Eventually we had to uproot ourselves from our apartment and find a backyard to call our own.

When we moved to our ugly blue bungalow they came along.  By that stage they were a part of the family.

In the first twelve months we were in our new house we somehow managed to find the time to transform the garden from this

to this....I will do another post on the evolution of our garden.  It's been a work in progress with me as landscape designer and sometime gardener and SM as the 'muscle' creating beds and retaining walls, digging holes and lugging plants around.  We took an overgrown and unloved garden and created order and a patch of grass that would make any bloke proud.

Knowing what hardy and special plants they were, we planted a new Camellia hedge along the boundary and inserted our two babies into the row.  It's under planted with Liriope (a plant that repays you in spades as it's easily divisible and makes loads of new plants to use in your garden).

They have flourished alongside their new brothers and sisters.  Each winter they burst forth in flower and repay us all the care we have lavished on them.

Another Winter, another bounty of blooms.