So the weather was incredible over Easter weekend! Thankfully, as we had hundreds of plants arrive during the week before, ready to do the next stage of landscaping around the pool area.
We sent Amelie up to my parents’ place for a couple of nights so we’d have two whole days to devote ourselves to planting out the garden…and then I got sick. There wasn’t a chance I was going to be able to do anything useful. I was upset – look how perfect that weather is! – but grateful that we had previously hired someone to come help us out for a day, and that one of our friends came up to help as well, so Hayden wasn’t working on his own!
In the photos above are pleached Portuguese laurels, olive trees, and griselinia. We put the laurels by the pool fence on both the long sides, with limelight hydrangeas and blue salvia in front of them, and a line of buxus in front of those to edge the garden beds. The olives went down the east side of the house, as the beginning stages of planting out an orchard down there, and the griselinia replaced some in the hedge that died after an extremely dry summer over 2019/2020.
We put the pittosporum further up the hill, with the idea that they’ll grow to fill in a gap in the trees up there.
In the garden beds at the back of the pool, we planted thuja (small conifers – they’ll grow to a few metres tall) and Japanese maples (acers). We also have some lavender back there, along with a line of buxus (the same as on the long sides). Once the thuja grow, they’ll block out the car parking area so all we can see from the house will be the pool, and the trees behind it.
All the plants have now been in for a few weeks, and are looking great. We’re lucky in that we’ve had a lot of both rain and sun since the planting was done, so the garden is being treated well by the weather. I can’t wait see how it looks by the end of next summer! Things grow fast around here, and we’re definitely not green thumbs, but we got really good advice and help on this planting scheme. Fingers crossed…wish us luck!
The Judd Crew 
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