The garden in April : snapshots

The trellis border: rosella ready to bloom as it cascades
into Malaleuca

Now that the Summer is passing here on the shores of Deception Bay, the garden is recovering from its blight. It was wet wet wet...

Assuming the deluges have passed...

Assuming that -- I can make the best of what I've got growing.

So April is a new beginning,outside and outback.

A world away  in another time, Geoffrey Chaucer captured April as a medieval Spring which nonetheless touches on my very own  here and now:

WHEN that Aprilis, with his showers swoot, sweet
The drought of March hath pierced to the root,
And bathed every vein in such licour,
Of which virtue engender'd is the flower;
When Zephyrus eke with his swoote breath
Inspired hath in every holt and heath grove, forest
The tender croppes and the younge sun twigs, boughs
Hath in the Ram  his halfe course y-run,
And smalle fowles make melody,
That sleepen all the night with open eye,
(So pricketh them nature in their corages); hearts, inclinations
Then longe folk to go on pilgrimages,
And palmers for to seeke strange strands,
To ferne hallows couth in sundry lands;distant saints known
And specially, from every shire's end
Of Engleland, to Canterbury they wend...

My pilgrimage is a walk along the pathways and below the trellis near where "smalle fowles make melody".

Choko beginning to fruit on the trellis

The excitement of the rush of Choko fruits  is  cause for a daily scrutiny so that I can harvest at golf ball size. You'd never go back to Zucchini again. Among it all the beans seldom make it into the house because they are consumed in situ: under the trellis, pilgrimaging.

Madagascar  bean stems cut back and laid
along the paths as trench mulch.

I had grown New Guinea bean over the tellis but it was so vigorous and with the overcast skies and frequent rain  my salad vegetables weren't getting enough sunshine over Summer. Choko is much more controllable, just a trim here and there. Chokoes taste better too. On trellises, Choko  fruit is easier to spot and  harvest.

Trellis now being covered with choko and snake beans
shade salad garden underneath

 The way the trellis works is that by using 'snakes' -- knotted rags I drop from the cross beams -- I can grow  climbing beans on the trellis from anywhere in the garden beds.These beds are mainly growing salad greens and herbs: rocket, chicory, oakleaf lettuce, endive, mint and 

parsley

Layering of paper and cuttings to trench
mulch pathways Nearby: sweet potato vines.

By layering the garden paths with plenty of newspaper, cardboard and brush cuttings I'm building up a trench of mulch which is shredded by traffic along the path. I find it is  a simple matter of throwing what comes to hand on the path and if necessary throwing some grass clippings atop any newspaper so that it doesn't blow away. 

Front gate arched by driftwood structure and jasmine

On the beach is so much dead wood -- a  Moreton Bay standard as coastal vegetation on the sandy islands  and sand spits, like ours, are undermined by shifting currents and storms. The dead wood -- mainly Mangrove branches and Sheoaks with some Malaleuca -- make intricate shapes, often patterned by the decoration of sea worms and shell creatures. I love using the wood for garden decoration and structures. It gives the garden a true sense of place.

No mowing: gravel garden among the greenery. Also very
unfriendly to cane toads

Putting down gravel over sand was a wonderful event. The Mediterranean 'feel' merges so well with native plants and selected exotics -- in this picture Frangipani and Lavender among indigenous. Since the birdlife is pro active and various the garden back and front is always alive with flying colours and chirps. At night the ponds -- four outback and away from bedroom windows --  are home to a chorus for Striped Marsh frogs.

---

Hate Lawns and mowing? Go gravel!

 A year ago I started to lay down gravel where the omnipresence of lawn used to be. By dint of similar landscape fiddles I have not mowed grass in decades. I hate, positively hate, lawnmowing.

That I am building my growing garden on sand by using all the lawn clippings I can get, is -- I grant you -- a massive contradiction. I'm an opportunist: one person's chlorophyll trash is another's treasure, right? (It must be -- look at me.)

Here where I live The Laying Down of the Stones, like the touch of God, is a landscape standard. 

Underneath all the way down is sand and sand doesn't hold moisture so well. When you carpet with stones, on sand there's no surface pooling of water. It becomes a rocky skin -- but one that protects the underneath from evaporation.

If I had my way my own domicile would be completely mulched  and gravelled, but the other domestic live-in half wanted some lawn for people sports like playing catch with the dogs.

That I have to mow ! (Grrrrr!)

Anyway, gravel gardening on sand with native plants works a treat. Throw in a few exotics -- Lavender, Jasmine, Rosemary... esp the Mediterranean flora -- and you'll have a picture fab landscape idyll. 

Engaging with gravel has its feedbacks and my  Laying Down of the Stones proved to be a learning exercise.

Midgies/Sand Flies

One of the primary reasons for gravelling here -- especially close to the house -- was to reduce the opportunity for sandflies (midgies) to gather.  The vicious bite of sandflies (Ouch!) can ruin many an evening in swampy coastal areas like ours and my logic was that maybe they won't appreciate rocky terrain and inorganic mulch and take  up residence elsewhere. Since there's no way to keep sandflies corralled -- they are small enough to pass through fly screens -- my design brief was to manipulate the environment so they'd be kept at very very long unbitten arm's length.

Voila (Eureka moment! Eureka moment!) gravel gardening (thought I)!  Ditto for mosquitoes.

Once I  combined an abhorrence of lawnmowing with a fear of sandflies, the rest, as they say, is history. 

I gravelled on.

I used  the cheapest aggregate I could get, but -- and I apologise to all those organic  puritans out there -- I laid down plastic weed mat underneath. The mat made dealing with weeds possible while enabling me to spend much less money  on gravel as I could get away with a shallower layer of stones. The main game was to grow bushes and small tress while reducing the organic wherewithall underneath so that weeds and sandflies couldn't gain  habitation.

The layout works a treat. No mowing. No mowing! Occasional weed pulling and so far, not much in the way of early morning and evening savagery of flesh bites. There's also very little watering involved. Gravel gardens look after themselves.

The only drawback with gravel is that without stepping stones  gravelled areas are brutal on  bare feet. 

But here's a tip -- something I learnt by coincidence: when laying down the gravel contour the ground so that you get depressions, swales  and gullies. Gravel on  plastic mat makes for easy rain water harvesting and flow.  The water still passes through to the sand below but is slowed and directed where you may want it. You can also engineer typography where -- on flat sand  -- none originally existed.

Gravel Gardening Traditions

I was keen to explore the gravel more. Get my hands  on the rock thingness to see what the stones could do for me.

I thought I was a bit out there as covering so much of your domestic real estate with gravel isn't the done thing. But there is one site -- ecologica -- which made me feel better about my radicalism.  Similarly a research paper on how the people of Easter Island/Rapa Nui -- deployed stone mulch  to grow their vegetables -- made me think that there is logic -- ecological logic -- in gravel gardening.

There is tradition in the method -- a tradition that has been both lost and misunderstood.

The Easter islanders were desperate to protect and sustain their crops.  The stone friendly Italian gardening method offered by ecologica are reminiscent of  the gardens that could be found  in inner city Melbourne or Sydney  in the wake of migration of Southern Italians to Australia.However, cement -- and in my experience locally, plenty of it -- ruled over gravel.

Today the green mythic preference is driven by Permaculture archetypes born in the ecology of the rain forest. But the Italians -- gardening in low water condition for centuries -- developed a  different take on garden design and domestic agriculture.

So I reckon the stones can tell us a thing or two about sustainability.

I'm all ears.

For the moment (see above image) I'm a newbie in the laying of the stones. Other stoned gardens I've seen embrace gravel as a textural palate and try to lay down contrasting sizes, hues and shapes for sculptural effect. It's  a sort of pretend desert vogue.

But that's not the way of it at all. The 'rockery' habits imported from the United States over the years have tended to obscure the underlying ecological...logic. The stereotypical 'rock garden' has done gravel a diservice.

In the UK, Beth Chatto's template for gravel gardens  seems to only embrace the logic in a sort of half arced mode -- aspiring to look like something that is trying to be exotic --without embracing unconditionally and 'organically ' the underlying raison d'etre. (Such as the way gravel was used by the Cottagers)

But that's the point, I think -- the issue that bugged me: do the pebbles belong? Will they serve me as I hope?

Gravel Gardening and microclimating

Gravel yard

I have just finished laying down a layer of cheap gravel over all of the front yard.Below that is weed mat.

The gravel is 20 mm drainage aggregate  so it won't be going anywhere in a hurry.

It has taken me some time to do all this but I have finished in time for 2011.

Since I will  replicate the same gravel garden approach at the back of the house, I have to wonder what I am doing.

Why stone over the grass?

That I positively despise mowing is the cheapest answer. Lawn mowing is  up there with the most wasteful of  spent energy.  And having to mow when you can't (as happens with me because of ill health) --or don't want to -- is a  a form of suburban oppression.

If you aren't going to use a lawn -- such as to play cricket upon its stems -- what's the point of having one?

In fact, in my outlook, a lawn is so many weeds clumped together.

But I am, if you excuse my pretense, a gardener. I value plants and manipulated ecology. So I need to make sense of my impulses to over rule verdant biology by suppressing it under stone.

Stone is as natural as dirt. It happens all over. And stone has insulating attributes that will protect rooted plants from the vagaries of the weather and retain moisture. Where I live now, the soil layer if it exists, is very thin as the earth is beach sand all the way down.

So gravel gardening is often used in my community as a means to protect  plants from the sieve that is sand. There is also  no reason here to build up garden beds for the sake of improving  drainage.

While a gravel coating will increase ambient temperature as the stones will retain and reflect heat , when the plants grow, the gravel surface will be shadowed  and a new dynamic is -- or may be -- introduced. So I reckon you need to plant to shade the gravel by using small tress, bushes and especially ground covers.  

Just like your stereotypical 'rock garden'. 

But here we don't go planting  desert vistas with succulents. Here we plant drought tolerant Australian natives (Grevilleas, Hakeas, Kangaroo Paws, and the like)-- and Mediterranean herbs (like rosemary and lavender).

So a gravel garden is a drought tolerant garden  where  the protective mulch doesn't rot away and shade is also deployed as a mulch element.

When I finished the front and began to ponder my backyard options I was concerned that I was  going to surround the house with a hot space zone. Shouldn't I be trying to cool the house by promoting more direct shade or a fostering a terrain through which any breeze would have its temperature reduced?

I've grown trees close up to buildings before in search of shading  and they only lead to blocked gutters, more mosquitoes and reduced internal light. They can also block the breeze when it blows. So I was keen to not only use stones but more or less treat the front and rear gravel zones as courtyards sparsely populated by plants with nothing whatsoever  in common with rain forest style.

And the more I looked at  the gravel template the more interesting and exciting it became. You can cool gravel by shading it. That's clear and the thermal mass of all those stones should have a certain  insulating reward ...if cooled. The bugs I hate -- the mosquitoes and sand flies especially -- are kept at also arms length from the front door  as stones aren't their preferred neighbourhood.

But the thing that really sparks my attention is the prospect that maybe -- maybe --  surrounding a house with stones here in subtropical South East Queensland may also reduce residential  humidity. 

Is that a possibility, do you think? Since the air has to travel across such a  dry surface area and one that doesn't in itself hold moisture -- maybe it will cause the air to lose some of its warm vapour? 

The related prospect is  how effective would be any sharp  environmental contrast between the temperature inside the house and the ambiance on the gravel gardens directly outside. What would be the consequence for air movement?

I recall that traditional southern Mediterranean and Arab house design use this contrast to good effect as a means of promoting air movement to cool houses. In Sicily houses  are not cooled by planting trees. Rather, thermal mass - through stone and cement -- is orchestrated to effect temperature reduction. And in Morocco etc, shade cloth and mesh are used to shade an outdoor space  rather than anything vegetable. In Spain, a courtyard will often have  a pond or fountain in order to moisten and cool  the air but the rest of the space will be stone or cement.

If I could make the air both cooler and drier over the gravel zones then I am ahead of simply making the air cooler if I were simply to rely on grass. 

I'm not being rigidly schematic here  as the other part of the design story is the contrast between organic and inorganic mulching. One of the reasons why I switched to using gravel in some areas was that I wanted to deploy any organic  material I could get my hands on to better effect mulching  fruit and vegetables. So outback, the 'inorganic' gravel zone gives way to a zone steeped in grass clippings, manure and the like -- any number of collected organic mulches.

So the pivoting part of the template is separating organic from inorganic mulching: inorganic vs organic zones and making the best use of both.

The house with habitation

After being occupied by our selves these past  11 weeks the house at Beachmere has been customized.

That it's sand all the way down is a real plus as no water stays about even after the most rigorous torrents. 

But topsoil and the like is a bit of a problem when you have only sand at your feet. Since the front had been covered with bought in soil so that  a lawn could be grown , we've covered it all with stones so that the lawn can't grow.

 Stone gardening is  a Beachmere standard -- you bring in what is foreign to the place and exploit the contradiction. And stones over sand make a superb mulch that won't need endless topping up.

The back is being colonized by horse manure, topsoil pinched from the front and copious amounts of grass clippings (see pile in pic top right) delivered by a local mowing contractor. So slowly, a vegetable supply line is consolidating. 

All in 11 weeks. 

The bountiful rain fall has helped verdancy.

No problems except that I put my foot through the ceiling while laying down insulation.... DIY insulating is a bugger of a job  and I don't recommend the activity. Give me shovelling dirt any day.

I'm good at that.

Stones? Why stones?


If you are going to put together a garden ruled by native flora the whole question of water use is a key consideration. But obtaining mulches and over laying them  once each layer has broken down  is going to be either expensive or a practical challenge -- especially if you want to deploy collected organic mulches elsewhere to better effect. On top of that, who wants to mow?  I soon learnt that a flywheel push mower isn't the easiest device to cut grasses among trees. And a petrol driven power mower...no thanks. I hate them for personal use. You become a serf to the lawn of the manor.

So getting rid of the grass and replacing it with something that would not easily break down began to make a lot of (ecological and energy use) sense. Stones need to be pre crushed of course and delivered (I bought the cheapest aggregate: $68 per cubic metre) but we are not talking about the carbon footprint cement requires. Stones are also porous so there is no run off, nor mud either.

[Consider the carbon footprint of cement with the carbon footprint of  petrol mowing  the grass year in year out weekly or fortnightly with the carbon footprint of a crusher making the stones with the challenge of growing or collecting and upkeeping enough organic mulch to cover the whole area...]

Stones have a higher thermal mass as well  as heat refraction than organic mulch but as the bushes and trees grow that stored heat and radiation will be reduced by shading.Of course these same factors make them great mulch for plants during the heat.

The underlying plastic -- weed mat -- is not much more than what  a few visits to the supermarket would cause (and collecting enough cardboard or newspaper was beyond me for the surface area while I was doing just that for outback).

So 'stoning' the area began to make a lot of sense.

I'm going to have a 'hotter' summer out front because of the stored and reflected heat generated by the stones, but as the flora grows that will change and the stones will start storing other temperatures. I also hope that the stones will provide fewer niches for sandflies (or mosquitoes) which can be the bain of any wetland locality such as ours.