TheBanyanTree: Feeling happy

[PJMoney]

Rain has been falling for days.  Light to moderate showers have been
interrupted only by the occasional deluge.  There has been no break in the
cloud cover.  So the temperature has been delightfully cool but the solar
hot water system is getting no solar input, clothes hanging on our
under-verandah line never get drier than clammy damp and the house is dark
all day.

I wonder if these small inconveniences explain why I feel morose.  Maybe
it's the fact that the down light I had replaced only a few weeks ago has
stopped working.  Maybe it's just another flowering of my cyclothymic
discontent.  Maybe it's because there's something I've wanted to write for
months but, so far, I haven't succeeded even in producing a satisfactory
outline, or scaffolding, for what I want to say.

There's a remedy for my glum moods.  I just go to the front window and look
out at our new garden.    

After our first Wet Season in this house it was obvious that something
needed to be done to improve the drainage at the front.  My husband dug a
trench, laid agricultural piping in the bottom, filled the rest of the hole
with stones and solved the drainage problem.  Unfortunately, he piled the
removed dirt alongside the trench and subsequently managed to ignore all my
requests that he get the dirt piles removed too.  I would have shovelled the
dirt myself but sciatica really is a pain in the bum (and thigh, and leg)
and I had more to think about in those days than creating a beautiful
garden.

So the dirt piles settled and compacted.  Grass grew over them in the Wet
and died off in the Dry.  Meantime the two clumps of gold cane palms grew
from waist height till the tops of their fronds were higher than the house.
We had no idea you could thin them so they became choked with their own
shoots.  Getting dead fronds out of that tangle was a long, arduous, and
very sweaty task, and therefore it was easy to decide to do it next week or
the week after.  The front garden gradually turned into a sort of jungle
desert.  I gradually found looking at it more and more depressing.

Last Wet Season a new plant found a home there.  Here we call it "Mile a
Minute".  It's a vine and its common name describes its habit very well.  It
took over, I finally got fed up with the ugliness of everything and we
finally found someone who would not only promise to turn up to do the work
but actually did - a nice conjunction of circumstances.

Kevin, the garden man, decided it would be better to level the ground by
filling it in rather than digging it up.  Top soil at all landscape
suppliers having turned to slurry from being rained on for months he brought
in compost instead.  It cost a bomb but now I know the spongy, resilient
worth of it.

I started off with a tray of marigolds (about 8 plants), another of coleus
and a few other odds and sods.  As the marigolds flowered I dead-headed them
and spread the seeds randomly.  Soon marigolds were springing up wherever
they could get a decent amount of sunlight.  Where there wasn't much
sunlight ferns started growing all by themselves.  Another plant, a pretty
little thing with pink spots on the leaves, self-seeded everywhere.  The
coleus self-seeded too.  I bought some succulents of a lovely lime green
colour and bits fell off as I was planting them.  I stuck those bits in the
ground and they quickly took root and grew.  Now my garden is full of
colourful plants.  I look at it and its colour and prettiness makes me feel
happy.  I still have to keep it under control but that's just weeding,
picking up the palm fronds that have fallen, all by themselves, and thinning
out the palm shoots.  When the annuals die off I'll have fun deciding on new
plants to put in.  

You can see a part of my garden here:
http://s241.photobucket.com/albums/ff41/hokeygrandma/?action=view&current=Ga
rdenMarigolds.jpg