Ok brace yourselves for a phot post inundation. I have written a HUGE post with all the pictures in one, then the internet ate it so now I am going to break it up into several smaller posts. Anyone not wanting to see LOTS of pictures of my garden, now is your chance to leave........

Ok here is a before//during of our backyard which we pretty much stripped back to a blank canvas, not being fond of the general theme of spiky semi tropical plants failing to thrive in Melbourne. Yuccas everywhere and palms. Not my cup of tea at all.

You can see all the stumps in the pic and the baby hardenbergias just starting along the fence. We kept the kangaroo paw, gumtree (it later fell down in a storm ) and the grevillia, mostly so the chooks would still have somewhere to hang out. Planning to get rid of once the other stuff fills out a bit. It was very bare and kind of gross for a while so we wanted to keep SOMETHING bushy. There we lots of volcanic rocks just sort of randomly blobbed about, so we piled them all up to create a rockery area.

How it looks now - we planted dwarf eucys, silver princess, abutilon, hardebergia and there is a fair bt of nasturtiam which escaped the herb garden... I'll be replacing that with pigface down the track. there is a lovely little bottlebrush just starting to flower in the back corner, and once it is big enough the grevillia will come out. We'll be putting in a lot more kangaroo paw in the front area. Oh and there is a native mint (prosthentera rotundafolia) between the trunks of the dead gumtree...