There is so much happening in my little patch of Heaven that it’s difficult to find a place to start. Suffice it to say that it was brilliantly tiring! I love it. I really do. Such a sense of fulfillment is really hard to come by. I guess this is one of the major reasons that I have been so taken by gardening. It is truly a rewarding activity.

Since putting Mr. Buddha in his place to christen the Oriental patch, the adjoining side which is overlooked by the “Old Lady”, our trusty and gnarled Frangipani we brought with us from the old house, just didn’t look right. It had a few shrubs here and there, a few cacti at the back wall (I got those for my last birthday) and well, it now looked completely unbalanced. So it need a major rethink on what I wanted it to be.

I decided to make it complement the Oriental patch, in fact, I wanted it to be completely integrated and not regarded as a separate piece of the garden at all. I decided that probably the best thing to do there is take everything (apart from the Old Lady) out and cover the whole area there with stones or pebbles. This will immediately bring the “Zen” back into the game and the Oriental patch would simply flow into the dry river-bed motif.

Plan in place, I started working. The first thing was to remove all the cacti and put them in pots, those pots I wanted to position on the pool deck in a cluster of variously sized pots and shapes. I think looking at the previous post where I featured this change, you will probably agree that they look quite the picture. I promise you that in real life they look even better!

Not all were moved as I didn’t have enough pots. I certainly didn’t have a huge pot which I needed (wanted) for the big cactus. That then had to wait until I bought more pots and they get delivered. I had two bushes in there too that needed to come out, a hibiscus and a lantana. The lantana was thriving while the hibiscus was just sitting there not doing much, but not dying either. A bunch of mother-in-law’s tongues and another cactus as well as a henna tree were scattered in that patch too.

I was rather happy that I moved the majority of the cacti on Thursday evening. That would free up a lot of time for Friday and beyond to tackle the various tasks.

Friday morning comes and I am awake at 4.45AM (I know I know!) and down having some tea, reading the papers and thinking about the stuff I needed to do. By 8.00AM I had cooked breakfast and had everyone up! I needed to get out and wanted to drag Frances out with me too. Time for some quality time together too.
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