A moveable feast

I treat my rear courtyard a little like a living room: when I get depressed I change the furntiture!

It gets a lot of sun, so I have an umbrella. It is visually private but aurally not so. When I arrived it was totally overrun with weeds and unformed. I evened out the surface and scrounged around the neighbourhood for bricks that looked good. This is the rear of the terrace which - as you might suspect from the ground level being half-way up the wall - suffers from terrible rising damp. However, after about 130 years, it is still standing.

That dog is such a big dope

Waiting for the danger to pass: Henry is a dopey Labrador who lives two doors up and likes to lick Sellie. She hides under the miniature Nandina Domestica and, when he gets a whiff of her, she is up and through the partially open front-window-escape. All my doors and windows have grills. I am used to it. But it also means that I can leave three windows open with impunity and still be household-contents-covered. The cats come and go when they please.

The downside is that frequently I can come home to four cats waiting to be fed!

Rear courtyard

The owner, who lives next door, was working on this terrace as I clambered over to check it out as rentable. It suited my social-conscience, was inexpensive and had dirt. I must have dirt.

To my chagrin, he replaced the ramshackle back fence with a roller-door which is getting more onerous as the months roll on. This is the backdrop for my Sylvie - aged 9 and named for my paternal g'ma - as she listens to the wind creak the hanging baskets (geranium, mint and succulent). Behind her, in the pots, is tangible evidence of my European excursions: a tub of lime, lavender and fig. I will show you the lemon and the olives later. Christine and I have just about agreed to return to Italy in the northern spring of 2010.

1880s cottage for railway workers

This is a single-fronted (12' not 15') terrace with a side passage leading to a service lane at the rear. This passage is on the south side. Each sft is one of a pair and there are 7 pairs in the street. The other side of the street is now a set of 1980s apartments built to replace a Water Board Maintenance site which served for the last few years of its life as a home for stray cats.

Don't spare the horses

Nearly home: opposite the first plot of purple ground cover; just beyond the orange Chinese lantern bush. I walk to and from work and frequenly it takes 15 minutes to walk this 100 metre stretch: the neighbours are a lovely, friendly bunch and I am a bit of a have-a-chat.

The front porch

Sunflower blue Lobelia, nodding violet and begonia sway in baskets above the Durante, the Wolemi Pine and a large potted ficus.

The heart of a Wolemi Pine

I bought three of these - on behalf of my father - for Christmas 2006, his final Christmas in the real world. He then proceeded to give one to Ross, one to me and one to his wife, Peggy. For the Christmas just gone, I bought him a Wolemi Pine to nurture in his nursing home together with his two African Violets and his pointsettia.
The WP has a fascinating growth pattern which I will try to document through the cycle. It has a liking for multi-forking and secretes a white waxy substance to seal the newly forming "spikes". Very neanderthal ...

From the living room window

A bit each way

The then or the now: what to show you?

I have plumped for the now! The main photo I took two days ago and shows my Durante. This is a tough plant to remember the name of so I simply try to recall "The Snozz" which works a treat. This bush loves the Eartha Kitt treatment: rough, rough, rough - a bit of slash and burn never goes astray! Gorgeous blooms though, hey!

The plant in the pot is the same, just not long after I bought it two years ago. It does require a lot of water and a lot of trimming come early June.

Now to my front garden which is image three. I have a terrace right? Single-fronted, one storey terrace: pocket handkerchief garden out front and ditto out back. This be the front 6 months after I moved in. By then I had dug, sieved and manured. I relaid the front path. Removed all the pie wrappers from the soil. Aerated. Dug in chook poo and lucerne mulch. And questioned my own sanity.

It is a rented dump for crying out loud ... but if you are reading the Dickensian instalments over at "Plumbing the Deeps" you realise that I was born to be of the soil. I am never happier than when up to my elbows in soil'n'shit.

To set the scene

In 2006, I sold my apartment in Bondi and moved to a one-bedroom single fronted working man's terrace in Waterloo. I invested the ungarnisheed amount into my superannuation fund; remember, this is 12 months before Costello gave the massive lurks to such an action. Why?

Everyone kept on saying that owning a house was an emotional not an intellectual decision: that investing in the markets was a more reasonable way of dealing with one's funds. But what if you have to leave your rented premises? What if it is sold from beneath you and you are tossed out onto the street? Yep ... that is a problem. But I also get to move when I am unhappy. I can live anywhere I choose with just two weeks notice.

I was not to know about the massive hike in rents; nor the massive slide in superannuation fund valuations. I have dealt with the former by renting a tumble-down terrace for $280 per week, an amount which has not changed since May 2006. However, I always pay on time, and the place has never looked so good. Indeed, Robert did not think it COULD look this good. He says it puts his place to shame. Goodo ... And the slide in superannuation values I have sort of coped with by investing in cash just before the GFC in September.

Let's begin at the beginning

Even this is not the beginning, but rather six months down the track. I built the front garden from builder's rubble. I totally reorganised the rear courtyard. I rent, and my landlord lives next door. If I could not find what I wanted in my rubble, I scrounged through Robert's.

Come with me ...