A cottage garden

The garden here at the Old Bank is a new experience for me. It's filled with cottage-y plants and flowers, like tiny daisies, hellebores, lavender, geraniums, hydrangea. I confess to knowing little about flowers, so my friend Karla kindly visited last week to show me how to prune the roses and help me identify the various plants. The garden space is small and wraps around the buildings. There's no grass, but gravel, garden beds and a cute little garden path of stones. In Sydney we primarily grew Australian natives. Up in the hills of Franklin, we were surrounded by native temperate rainforest trees and plants like native pepperberry and man ferns. I grew vegetables and planted some fruit trees as well as a few imports like maple, spruce, crab apple and ornamental pear. Here in our little winter garden, there are already so many flowers. There are bulbs starting to appear and I'm looking forward to seeing what they all are. The camellia bush is about to explode with fluffy pink blooms. Aren't they gorgeous?

Bowled over by roses

The weather is warming up, and a bunch of locals have started playing barefoot bowls again on a Friday afternoon. Just like in the movie Crackerjack, the Franklin Bowls Club is looking at ways to expand its membership and remain relevant to the local community. It's a great way for us to unwind and have a laugh at the end of the week.

As the sun set on Friday, I turned around to admire the green hills of Franklin, but got distracted by the gorgeous rose bushes of different varieties all around the bowling green. Someone from the bowls club has been tending these beauties well...

Cottagey

Each time I visit Germany, I fall in love with the geranium-filled window boxes brightening up all the homes. The bright pinks, reds and whites contrast so beautifully with the white houses and dark roofs. Last week, David found me some planter boxes with brackets for our verandah. Today, I bought as many small geranium plants as I could find and filled them up.

Our home is white but far from cottagey. As much as I love the idea of renovating one of Tasmania's lovely old homes, the reality was that when we moved here, we didn't have the time or money to do it. We both went back to full-time work as soon as we arrived. So we moved into a new, modern home where all our Sydney-life furniture fitted in and we we didn't need to rush to buy new things. My new geraniums are a little cottagey touch that I will enjoy from my office desk.

Defrosting

As I write, it's warm and sunny. We've had three days of T-shirt weather. The welcome swallows are back again for the summer and swooping around, with their distinctive chirping. Bright yellow daffodils have popped up in the front paddock. We've been out in the garden on the weekend, digging, planting, weeding, watering, relocating raised garden beds. It's light enough to be outside at 6pm. The tomato and basil seedlings have popped up in their warm, indoor pots. Soggy patches of ground have dried up. The strong scent of wattle fills the air. Tiny buds have appeared on the fruit trees. Sebastian the rooster has a spring in his step and a look in his eye as he chases the ladies around the place. With our windows open, cheerful bird and frog noises float in. I know the warm days won't last (I'm not about to plant the potatoes yet), but for now, isn't spring wonderful?

In defence of flowers

I don't normally allocate space in the garden beds for flowers. Sure, we have 'accidental' flowers that pop up, like the daffodils that appear in ever greater numbers each year in the front paddock and some flowering bushes (native and not) planted by the previous owners. Growing food plants is more important and many of them look beautiful too. But this year, I got some free cottage flower seeds in an order from the Diggers Club and some poppy seeds from our lovely local vintage store Shop@Franklin and decided to mix them in with the vegetable beds to look pretty and attract the bees. The day after sowing the tiny poppy seeds, we had high winds and heavy rain and months later, nothing had sprouted at all. So I planted out some onions and leeks in that raised garden bed. Of course, only then did clumps of weedy looking plants start to appear. I didn't pull them out in the hope they might be poppies. Sure enough, the first variety has started to flower. In this week's damp and misty weather, the luminous dark red flowers look fabulous against the bright green grass and grey skies. I'm sold - more flowers from now on.