'Neath The Dear Garden Wall

 

Those of you who are family or at least longtime readers, may remember the makeover my dad and I did on the garden at Australiana House. Well, Himself and I are about to work some magic on our back garden right here and now! Here is the old garden.

 

 This was taken about 5 years ago when it didn't look quite as bad. Nevertheless there were roses in front of the retaining wall which grew up viciously in summer and stabbed anyone walking past the pool (on the upper level). There was also the Alcatraz like pool fence and the lack of any obvious place for entertaining. We tried putting a table and chairs down on the pavers at the far end, but it was in a traffic corridor and did not work.

In addition, to the extreme left of the above photo you would find the delightful patchwork shadehouse and paved BBQ area Himself created.

 With the two foot of dirt where the lawn refused to grow.

A few years on and you can definitely see the bulge in the middle pier of the retaining wall. Termites were at work.

Here's the view from the pool looking back towards the house. Yes, that would be the entire, unsightly collection of pool workings, there on the right of the picture. Nice.

After a few years, during which we realised that we rarely used the seating up on the pool level (well you have to climb over a bunch of rocks to get there...)

we moved the table and umbrella down to the lower level.

As you can see, it is cramped and inconvenient as Himself will not let us leave chairs and tables on the grass (because it kills said grass).  Note also the infamous retaining wall, now swathed in roses, ivy and sword ferns; leaning precariously, well off vertical, in places!
 

So, with the arrival of our second, undeserved but incredibly appreciated, windfall, we have commenced the garden makeover.

Our aims are to:
 a) obviously, replace/repair the retaining wall
 b) create an entertaining area
 c) make better use of the existing space
 d) replace the existing ancient pool workings with smaller, more efficient, modern gear which will 
     hopefully lower our power bills and reduce the amount of time Himself spends trying to keep it
     from going green. At the same time we hope to re-site the equipment so that the area around the
     pool is clear.

 

So the first step was to deconstruct the shadehouse. No2 son actually proved useful for once although he left the  mass of ivy for me to deal with.

The shot above was taken after I had dealt with the ivy that came down with the shadehouse. Now to deal with the wall....

Two hours later:

Later that night No2 Son again made himself useful and took down the Alcatraz fence. Once it was gone I was more determined than ever that it would NEVER go back up!!

The next day this little beauty turned up in my yard.

And the trashing began.