About Me
It wasn’t until the age of 36 that I actually became interested in gardens and gardening. In 1998 my wife and I bought our first house together in the small town just on the outskirts of Melbourne, Australia. The house was just a modest one and came with a neglected overgrown garden that consisted mainly of Australian Native Plants.
At the time I knew absolutely nothing about plants and gardening and it became apparent to me as time went on, that neither did the people who had planted the garden. It was very overgrown, unkempt and a lot of the plants were unsuitable by choice and also by where they had been positioned.
Where to start though was the big question. As I said I knew practically nothing about plants but the one thing that I was told by a so called gardening expert was that Australian native plants tend to grow very fast, get very straggly (unattractive) and don’t tend to live very long. So, based on that little bit of information I decided that to start with a clean slate was probably the best option.
I then proceeded to cull nearly every plant in the garden. This turned out to be quite a large job. One day when I was about half way through cutting nearly all the branches of a Grevillea my mother came to visit. She’d been an avid gardener for years and asked me what I was doing to the Grevillea. She then quickly advised that if I just pruned the branches back a bit and shaped the plant, it would grow back again, look much more attractive and probably flower more than it ever had before. As it turned out she was right. I’d just learned my first lesson in gardening, how to prune a plant (or rather that you should prune your plants) and don’t necessarily listen to everything you’re told by the experts.
As it turned out, I spent the next two years reinventing that garden and I learned quite of a lot about plants. That formed a relationship with a particular type of plants that can loosely be grouped into a category called “drought tolerant plants”. This is a group of plants that is wide and varied and come from all the continents of the world. The plants that I like the most though are the plants that are known as Australian Native Plants as well as a group of plants from South Africa known as the Protea family.
The garden that we grew around that house was our pride and joy but unfortunately for reasons that I won’t mention here today we decided to reluctantly put the house up for sale in 2004. As it turned out though by a twist of fate my mother and father were looking for a change of residence at the same time and decided to buy it. My mother who was more of a traditional gardener of plants that come from the northern hemisphere has now been converted to my type of plants, drought tolerant plants from the southern hemisphere. She’s personalised the garden a little bit but a lot of the plants I’d originally planted back in 1998 at still growing quite happily today. And the best part is I still get to visit them from time to time.
In 2005 we moved into a new home in Melbourne so I had a blank canvas to start with for my new garden. This new garden that I have today along with my old garden (my mother’s) will form the basis of my articles that I will continue to add as time goes by.
The great thing about gardening is that there is so much to learn, much of it through reading and listening to others but I’ve always been of the belief that the greatest knowledge ever learnt in a lifetime is that learnt by getting out and participating, taking risks, making mistakes and creating something unique. It is my wish that you the reader will find my posts interesting, informative and maybe just change the way you look at things if only just a little bit.
So have a read, feel free to comment or if you dare, even contribute.
Mike Bowater.