HI Artie my Garden is about four years old and starting to shape up real good. Your Favourites the native are the oldest plants I have so they are nearly the tallest ( As the Bamboo are about 6 mts now ) especially G. banksii red, I have managed to grow a seed of the white G.banksii and its about 10-12cms tall I may put that one into a bigger pot or do you think it it big enough now to go into the ground as I dont want to lose it. The qld maples 2 1/4 years planted are about 3mts tall, one Illawarra flame is taller 3 1/2 years planted, Lemon and grey myrtle 2yrs planted very small under 1mt. The firewheel tree had doubled its height in one year but the blue lilly pilly has taken four years to get to 2 mts. Golden Penda has not made much growth in 14 mts either but there is a bit of new growth a while back .Native Frangipani has more than doubled in less than one year about 2.1mts

The trees I have planted from self sown seeds, like the Leopard tree have grown about 2 mts in less that one year so everything is coming along in leaps and bounds of course the best growth has been from the Bougainvillea, Frangipani, Hibiscus, plumbago I am forever pruning them too many things to mention here Artie but by four years your garden should be lush. O I forgot the Golden Cane that is huge ( Its hubby's thats not my type of plant ) I have heaps of other things too many to mention especially roses so I wont. So grab a chair a book and a drink and sit back and just wait for it to happen.....Cheers..MM.

My previous garden was 10 years old, and we shifted to almost a clean slate here, with a few nice tree ferns and some rhododendrons.
I decided I wanted to get there in 5 years this time, as I am getting older, so we bought large deciduous trees. The trident maples were $70 reduced from $120 as the nursery was closing. These are glorious at the moment in their autumn colour, and I will try and get 2 more big ones this year.
The deciduous trees are the backbone of my garden so I tried to get them in first, but had to at least form some ideas about how I wanted it laid out. The garden has developed it's own character as i have gone along. I can happily say that, 4 years on, I have achieved what i wanted, but I certainly have many more things to do in the garden on a smaller scale.
Currently we are building a fence to enclose the rear portion of the garden, which gets rather wet in winter. I prefer my mostly indoor dogs not to look as if they have been swimming in mud :-) This fence is creating many more small garden bed ideas that I will work on over the next year or so.
My big achievement last year was the landscaping of the front garden, after we finished renovating the house. We designed the garden ourselves but had the hard landscaping done professionally to our design and closely supervised by me. We had the job of filling in a driveway along the front of the house. This now looks like an established garden after less than 12 months from completion. I feel that the most important thing here was leaving in the already established diosmas, buddleias, viburnums, etc and working around them. The landscaper wanted to start with a clean slate but i stuck to my guns, and I'm so glad I did.
Artie you must be fairly young if you aren't aware of how rapidly time goes by. It takes much patience to make a garden. enjoy it as it develops and take many photos.

Hi Sparaxis and MM,

At 47, I'm far from 'young', although gardening does seem to attract an older demographic. We Aries are an impatient bunch, but my patience varies - sometimes I'm happy to let the emerging garden be, and other times I want it all yesterday.

I guess one of the things that haunts me is that I left another fledgling garden just as it was starting to really take off (18 months) and I now have to drive past plants that havent been pruned/weeded/watered since. I came to gardening quite late in life (post 40), and I have always longed for a tropical rainforest in my backyard. Such is life :)

MM, it really sounds like your garden is an oasis - very inspiring. Keep up the great work.

Cheers,

Artie

Well Artie I spent a lot of today making a new rose garden bed after I heard on the news this morning that it is buckets and no hoses anymore for watering our gardens in Brissie after June 13th I was going to wait till later and transplant three of my Standard roses as they are not doing very well where they are I also bought a new climber/rambler rose and I wanted to grow it as a pillar and with hubbys help I now have a PVC pipe 2.4mts tall surrounded with chicken wire and reinforced every 40cms to keep it round actually it looks like a very long crayfish or prawn trap you would know what I mean sitting up in the air, but all I can see is this prawn trap covered in pink blooms in years to come.

Firey and impatient and I wont wait so I do everything myself till my strength runs out as I wont see 62 again and I am starting to feel my age in the garden lately because it is so dry it takes ages to dig holes and I have to keep putting water in them and go back later then do more then when I have had enough I yell out to hubby and he finishes it for me. I go out every morning to see if any plant has grown just the littlest so I am a lot like you. Artie I would not say my garden is a oasis but maybe one day when we get rain it will look like that...Cheers..MM.

my garden started transforming from a lawn desert to a tropical fruit tropical look garden about two years ago.

Still a long way to go - but she gives me a feed every now and then and is starting to look the way I want her to be.

I've got bananas that are fruiting and have been in the ground for less than a year; there's a five-six metre tall mullberry grown from seed planted in 1994; I have a nectarine that's flowering again - the third season of flowers and fruit (and hopefully this year no fruit fly); a fernery that is so cool in summer and a pergola that is starting to fill out nicely with birds and pot plants.

Your garden will grow with you and out live you, enjoy what's there at the moment and look forward to what will grow and develop.

I have been gardening here for 22 or more years and I'm still working on it, I very much doubt a garden is ever "finished"...:) Here is a photo taken from near the front gate last year I think....there were a lot of mature trees on the block when we built, an added bonus but also can be a drawback. Another 5 years and I shall be starting over yet again on another property.

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Hello Quenda, nice to see you and your lovely garden here!

My garden was begun in 1991 and it has changed considerably since. Many of the early trees have gone, especially natives which died and which I didn't replace. My mango had to be removed because it needed more sun as it got crowded out when other trees grew too close. But for many years I did have the longed-for jungle, complete with creepers and, at one stage, a tree-snake.

I am now changing to a tropical garden with a few trees and palms (Cuban Royals, Foxtails) as the bones, cordylines, dracenas and phylodendrons in the middle and bromeliads underneath. I'm attaching orchids, staghorns and airplants to tall trunks and it's starting to all pull together.

I love it but if I was to start over again, I think I'd go for a more modern garden, with group plantings in different colours and heights, just to try something different.

Artie
I can understand how you feel. In 2001 we moved on to our 14 acres with a house needing renovation and an extremely overgrown garden which I was going to slowly bring back to life. Its too long a story but drainage problems, trees too close to the house and vast expanse of windows facing due west necessitating a verandah, led to the entire garden being ripped out apart from a couple of trees. I'll never forget the sick feeling as I watched the excavator turning the mature garden into a desert. And as I am 60 this year, I certainly don't have time to waste. However I started planting in 2003 and the hedges, and trees are really coming along. My advice too anyone who is impatient is keep taking photos. I can get incredibly depressed about how slow it is and then I find a photo of what it was like 2 years ago and I realise just how quick the progress has been. I am already hosting the garden club each year.
As we are very exposed to the south, I created a 24 metre long raised garden and planted it with rainforest plants in spite of being told I was wasting my time because of the frosts we get and the exposed position etc. It was planted as all tubestock in August 2004 and already the southern view from our bed is now of trees and bushes. The Achronychia oblongifolia are taller than I am and thats in less than 2 years. So hang in there - it does happen.

Artie,

Living in Rocky you will find that like here once your palms 'find their roots' they will rocket along.

I have had my current garden for almost 6 years. It was already well established with mostly the wrong type of plants. I removed all of the citrus (shaded out and with borers), stonefruit (just don't perform well in our humidity), Queen and Cotton Palms (obvious reasons), Pecan nut tree (dead stick in winter), Pepper tree and Swamp cypress (too big) and murraya hedges (I hate hedges)! I did leave a framework of some existing palms such as some old and large Alexandra (numerous), Golden Canes, Clumping fishtail, Chinese Fan, Footstool along with some tropical fruit trees such as a massive Black Sapote, Lychee, Longan, Bowen Mango, Carambola, star apple

My first palm plantings are around 5 1/2 years old and are really flying along. These include Coconuts (now fruiting), Carpies, Christmas, Solitaires, Bottle palms, Veitchia joannis, Veitchia winnin and a number of rarer species.

About 5 years ago I started planting bamboo and have around 8 species in the ground looking fantastic. As the canopy developed I obviously filled in the understory with plants such as Cordylines but these are now being replaced as more and more shade encroaches.

Everything now is looking quite well established but every now and then I decide that another fruit tree must go to make way for something else such as my recently planted Licuala garden. It is then that the process of waiting for the established look starts again!

Andrew.

Hi Artie,
4 years ago,I moved into the most unloved and mismanaged house you could imagine. It had been rented out for 20 years. The gardens were no more than a huge bunch of weeds. As there is a full acre under gardens, you can imagine the mess! It took 2 years to find where the gardens started and the lawn? finished. To our surprise, we found that the gardens were all edged in concreted (now with a very bad dose of concrete cancer from being buried for so long) bush rock. There were a few trees still living, so I started planting around what could be salvaged of the original garden. I would say that (for me) the 10 year mark might just be about the timeframe to get these gardens back into some sort of order. But you can see where we have been and how they are coming on. I don't tend to get impatient in the garden - I just enjoy each improvement and each step. There is nothing like touching the earth to keep you healthy and happy (as my grandmother would have said).
Just enjoy what you do as you do it.
Cheers
Julia

Thanks for all the wonderful feedback, folks - its reassuring to know that I am not the only impatient soul out there. Logic tells me that my plants will take off in the coming Spring, and I very much look forward to submitting some photos of said 'explosion' :)

Cheers,

Artie