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protea_king

Designing/replanting a drought hardy bed

13 years ago

Hi fellow Gardenwebbers. I've just begun the design phase of a bed in front of my parents' house. They've been talking about having it redesigned for ages and I am finally making the time to help them do it. When they first moved here back in '94 the front garden consisted largely of rose bushes. Over the years some roses died and were replaced, other 'exotics' were introduced (even one or two native plants), but it largely remained a rose garden. It got nowhere near enough water though as the climate is very dry and my parents don't have any kind of watering system set up, always been done by hand i.e. hose, sprinkler or watering can. The bed looked good for 2 or 3 months every spring and then everything died and went brown as soon as the summer heat and drought set in. We tried to condition the soil to hold on to its water as much as possible by adding and mulching with large quantities of farmyard manure, but had little success. The most talked about idea was always to replace these water thirsty exotics with native and non-native drought hardy plants like cacti and members of other succulent genera.

I've started removing and tidying the bed to get a relatively clean slate so that I can better see what I'm working with. The persisting plants, which include 3 large, very woody, pink-flowered Salvia bushes; a rather nice bi-coloured agapanthus; 3 Iceberg floribunda rose bushes; some Salvia leucantha; an old tired looking clump of Tulbaghia violacea, which barely musters any flowers anymore; Gazania hybrids; Plectranthus neochilus; Echeveria elegans(?); Kniphofia uvaria; yellow Hemerocallis cultivar; white Lantana (possibly montevidensis alba); Lotus berthelotii; orange Bulbine frutescens and white Plumbago auriculata. I am going to keep and transplant a couple of them; the rest will become food for either the worm farm or compost heap. Oh I almost forgot that there are also an established Wisteria sinensis and Callistemon splendens(?), which we've thus far decided to keep.

The layer of topsoil in the bed is quite thin; mostly about 6-8 inches deep before hitting the rock hard slate below, except for on one side where it goes down to about 20-23 inches. The soil itself consists of loamy-clay with bits of slate throughout, seems relatively fertile and even drains all right. Some old farmyard manure remains visible on the surface, but there is little other discernible organic matter.

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