A garden path

W&N watercolour on Bockingford 300gsm 

I always seem to be doing the opposite of what I should, like with gardening. In stead of jumping into gardening like everybody else in Spring, every Autumn I get this inexplicable urge to revamp my garden! I think it must be the cooler weather, much easier carting paving stones and pots around when it's not so hot.

I've just bought 10 bags of compost and a couple of bags of potting soil for a few potted plants and will be feeding the garden just as it wants to rest! But I'm sure all my earth worms will be thankful for a bit of extra sustenance during this cold period...

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This garden that I know

 "There is a garden that is not like the other gardens round about. In many of these gardens the flowers are only prisoners, forced to weave carpets on the changeless turf, and when the eye is sated and the impression palls, they become to their owners, who have no part in them, merely purchased episodes. 

This garden that I know has a bit of green, a space of flowers, and a stretch of wildness, as Bacon says a garden should always have. At its birth, the twelve months each gave to it a gift, that it might always yield an offering to the year, and presently it grew so lovable that there came to it a soul."

From 'The Story of a Garden' by Mabel Osgood Wright (1859-1934)

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Wildlife Triptych

Ink with W&N watercolour on a textured back-ground by Kim Klassen 

Three beautiful animals of the South African Bushveld . the Cheetah . the Rhino . the Gemsbuck 

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The Garden Party

W&N watercolour on Bockingford 300gsm - done from my imagination

"After all the weather was ideal. They could not have had a more perfect day for a garden-party if they had ordered it. Windless, warm, the sky without a cloud. Only the blue was veiled with a haze of light gold, as it is sometimes in early summer. The gardener had been up since dawn, mowing the lawns and sweeping them, until the grass and the dark flat rosettes where the daisy plants had been seemed to shine. As for the roses, you could not help feeling they understood that roses are the only flowers that impress people at garden-parties; the only flowers that everybody is certain of knowing. Hundreds, yes, literally hundreds, had come out in a single night; the green bushes bowed down as though they had been visited by archangels."

- Katherine Mansfield

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Lavender in a pot

 W&N watercolour on Bockingford 300gsm

Lavender (Lavandula angustifolia) is such a romantic flower that every gardener sooner or later succumbs to the urge to grow it. The fact that it is a native of the Mediterranean and a lover of dry, sunny, rocky habitats makes it a perfect specimen for our hot Highveld climate. It even manages our frosty winters quite well, probably because it is our dry season with not much rain. 

I have taken a couple of cuttings from a plant growing in my garden to try it in a pot, which I can put in a full sun position. I did this sketch from my imagination to try and "see" what it will look like and I've convinced myself! 

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