This is my favourite time of year. As Spring gently glides into Summer it brings a sense of new possibilities, holidays and parties.
I’m a warm weather girl and the increasing temperatures also make me feel lighter, more free and alive. Just stepping out the front door gives me a deep sense of contentment.
It also reminds me how little I know about plants.
The Card House is surrounded by trees, shrubs and flowering plants, most of which I don’t even know the names of. I can pick out the lavender, roses and cabbage trees, but the rest are a mystery.
So I’ve set myself a fun summer project (well, fun to a librarian anyway): I want to catalogue the garden. I’m going to take a photo of every different plant and use the power of the web and my own personal contacts to find out the name of each. I’ll put them all together – perhaps on a web page or in a scrapbook – so that we and any future owners of the house can refer to it in future.
As I’ve explored the garden over the past few weeks, all sorts of hidden treats have revealed themselves. Perhaps the most wonderful are the three ornate concrete pots I found half-covered in weeds at the back of the section.
Their white surfaces were badly chipped, but I could imagine how amazing they would look painted in bright primary colours.
So Barnard cleaned them with the water blaster and we bought test pots in red, green and blue from Mitre 10. I painted them over a couple of weekends and although it took some time to work the paint into all of the little crevices on their raised surfaces, the results were well worth it.
We’ve put ‘Red Robin’ shrubs into the red and green pots and placed them either side of the front door on the veranda. The blue one by the barbeque area holds a ‘Lemon and Lime’ coprosma.
The pots aren’t the only thing I found neglected in the garden.
While standing by the garage one day I spied three concrete mosaics buried in the soil.
It didn’t take much to dig them out, and applying the water blaster revealed their colourful patterns more clearly (see below).
I’m going to buy a tiny paintbrush and use it to freshen up the faded white background on each mosaic. I’m not sure where we’ll put them; probably by the pool somewhere.
As if that wasn’t enough, halfway down the back section I spotted a small concrete teddy bear on the ground next to a broken-down bench seat. The seat isn’t worth saving, but with a quick scrub and a slap of brown paint, I’m sure the bear will look as good as new. He can sit under the concrete toadstool we found near the laundry, and that I’m planning to give similar treatment.
I don’t know how it was that all of these objects came to be neglected. If I were the previous owners of the house, I might have been tempted to take them with me. But perhaps they felt The Card House is where they belong. And there may have been some self-interest at play where the pots are concerned; they’re pretty damn heavy to move.
The warm weather also inspired us to hold our first neighborhood barbeque over the long weekend. It was a good excuse to give the place a quick spruce-up, and fun to plan a combined South African/Kiwi menu. We kept it simple with steak and sausages (cooked on the braai, of course!) accompanied by bread and salad, with milk tart and peppermint tart to follow. Arki kept the kids entertained with ball-throwing demands and a good time was had by all. The only purchase we’ll need to make for future BBQs is a set of clips to hold down the plastic tablecloth; the famed Featherston wind made its presence felt just enough to be a nuisance.
Roll on Summer!
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