Finally. I've done what I've been wanting to for ages - fenced in the area that borders the Dark Verandah. Should I, shouldn't I? I agonized over it for ages mainly because it was no mean feat to claim that rectangular border which is a fairly large area. A lot needed to be done to peel off the lawn, dig up the soil, fill it up with plants and then of course, fence it in.
The bamboo fencing is something I already knew about. I bought a few panels to screen in the side porch at a great price from a place that I bought all the dark ceramic pots for this verandah. They were a great price because no one really appreciated their rustic beauty and lay in a few forlorn piles gathering dust for years. As I got closer to the decision of starting this project, I called them and asked for a price to take the whole lot. What they quoted was bananas, and so I acquired sixty panels of varying sizes and and the peeling and the digging commenced.
They sell single lengths of bamboo here, nine feet long, at the hardware store, wrapped in plastic to be used as washing lines or poles. Cut in half and stripped of the plastic, they became the the fence poles to wire these panels to. They are inexpensive enough to just hammer into the ground and not worry about their longevity. I did discover late into the process that I really should have just left a few inches of plastic wrap before knocking them in and that would have delayed that process. Live and learn.
Serendipitously, I had exactly the number of panels I needed of the same type, sort of a double diamond pattern, for this area leaving, again serendipitously, exactly the right number of panels to enclose the potager area (a slightly wider bamboo was used here) and exactly enough to do something new - more about that later. What bloomin luck.
As far as the dark verandah goes, its doing exactly what I wanted it to do, screen off and make private a courtyard area, while still maintaing a sense of the garden beyond it. The porousness of the fence does that. The picture shows a gate opening of sorts which frames the trees in the orchard and enhances the distance of the fence at the end of the garden.
Now comes the trickier part of planting. I'm moving the black bamboos there, they really aren't doing in well in the pots they're in. The black stemmed Lady palm Rhapis Excelsa on the other hand is doing great in a pot and I decided I like the look of them so much I bought three more to put in the border. Two other kinds of palms that have a delicate look, bambooish even, have gone in, one in fact called a bamboo palm Chamaedorea Seifrizii, the other Chrysalidocarpus Lutescens or Areca palm. Those are the main structural elements that now need time to gain height , I put a deep, mulch of twigs and leaves to 'finish' it so to speak while I continue to add things as I find them. So far a couple of ferns and potentially a lot more, I'm just going to move them in as I find them seeding themselves in other areas of the garden.
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