Gardening – A garden in transition

There is a saying in the gardening world that you should never go back to a garden that you created and have sold, as it usually ends in heartbreak. I’m a bit more pragmatic about it, as inevitably the new owner will make some changes to suit their lifestyle, suit their taste in plants or even bulldoze the whole lot for a development of some kind. I don’t really think about my last garden once I’ve moved on – it’s done; time to start a new project.

This is all on my mind right now as, once again, my ornamental garden is on the move and I have my own new project to think about. I’ve done this many times in the past and each time it involves the movement of literally thousands of plants. One epic move involved about 25 double-stacked van loads of plants. Another involved hiring a crane to lift a massive Butia, or jelly palm, from a second floor apartment balcony.

I have so many plants because I am a committed (my wife Angela would say I need to be committed!) collector of the rare and unusual, tropical and subtropical.

Some shifts have been carried out with little lead-in time, so I’ve lost precious plants, useful labels and incurred some serious grunt work. This time, though, I’ve had lots of notice as we started the process about a year ago, which gave me the opportunity to dig up and pot a lot of the plants that need to be shifted. At the same time, I’ve been engraving long-lasting aluminium labels for each variety so I can identify them no matter how they are looking after the move.

Now we are less than six months away from moving house, so the laborious job of transporting the plants into their next location has started. I’d like to be able to plant them straight into their final position, but the new property will be undergoing extensive renovation, and I know from experience how big a destruction zone that builders and other tradies need. There’s nothing like some lengths of timber, a trailer load of gravel or size 10 work boots wreaking havoc on your tender treasures.

Fortunately, this shift is literally next door; the property almost directly behind ours is the old Point Wells Church that we bought some years ago and have been running as holiday accommodation ever since. I managed to convince Angela that we couldn’t live without some extra garden area, so a boundary shift has added 500 square metres of land to the property, which coincidentally is where my food forest and veggie garden already lives. I must admit, that was a cunning plan.

So, all the potted plants are being shifted by wheelbarrow and hand-truck (some of those pots are really big and heavy) across the new boundary into any spare space in the food forest. This means I currently have the unusual sight of bromeliads growing under the plum trees, orchids growing next to clumps of rhubarb and bird of paradise alongside a bed of oats and chickpeas. Aesthetically, it is a mad jumble, but at least I know that the food forest is still producing and the plant collections will be safe until I can create my next, and hopefully last, garden.