🌺Enchanting Gardens: Today We Visit @SarahRajkotwala’s Garden In South Australia #GardeningTwitter #LoveGardening

Welcome to my series of gardens and their gardeners.

Over the next few months I’m adding to my regular gardening #SixOnSaturday posts with Sunday spots for fellow gardeners.

I first met Sarah through the books that she writes. Sarah has a wonderful approach to gardening and her beautiful flowers are her just rewards. Let’s find out more about Sarah’s gardens.

Where do you live? 

I live in sunny South Australia and have been a keen gardener since my teenage years.

Give us a little background to your gardening life.

Our organic country garden, is loaded full of flowers, butterflies, free range bantams and native birds. We also have three cats and a dog that run around and delight us with their antics.

I love colour and old-fashioned fragrant flowers in particular, like vintage roses, iris, carnations, sweet peas, freesias etc. It is a cottage garden style because I love all things romantic and cottagey. I am half Welsh so perhaps that explains my love for pretty cottage style things. So, I suppose my garden could be described as an Australian cottage garden.

I grow lots of fruit trees, citrus and vegetables too and would secretly like to be more self-sufficient in fruit, vegetables and even eggs some day. I would also love a ‘Flow’ bee hive too, God knows we have enough bees to fill it!

Our garden is big, but I am limited by how much I can realistically weed and water! If I want to expand my garden, I can and it kind of grows anyway. On much of our land we have a couple of ponies that keep the grass and weeds down in summer and give us lots of free manure for the garden and eat our veggie scraps. The free-range bantams eat the rest and keep any pests down.

Australian native plants provide hardy and beautiful colours. Here we have a purple native hibiscus Alyogyne huegelii and an Eremophila nivea (emu bush)!

What soil type and growing temperatures do you have?

Our climate is a temperate Mediterranean style. The climate ranges from -5 in winter to 42 degrees in summer. Our soil is alkaline sandy loam with occasional rocks like quartz, limestone and slate. Our soil is soft and easy to work except where the trucks came to build our current house, where it got compacted and we had previous nursery weed-mat. We have cold wet winters and spring rains and hot dry summers and autumns. To give you a point of comparison countries with a similar climate are Southern Greece and Southern Italy, Southern France, California, and South Africa. It is comfortable to garden in all year long, with a rain-jacket in winter or in the cooler mornings and evenings in the hot dry summer months.

Here we have native hibiscus, osteopermums, marguerite daisies and statice.

Tell us a bit about your garden / gardens

The area I am gardening in now is relatively new, only 3 years old after the bulldozers and builders came in and built the new house. So I am starting a lot of it from scratch, which is a delight. I am using my previous knowledge of the garden and putting in only the plants I like and know do well. I also propagate a lot of plants myself to save on the costs and fill up the garden quickly with my most beloved plants.

I use lots of Mediterranean climate flowering perennials, shrubs and sub-shrubs and attractive flowering Australian natives, like purple flowered emu bushes and Alyogyne purple hibiscuses. I have collections of bearded irises that flower all October. Old fashioned vintage and modern shrub roses that flower in November along with a lovely collection of flowering garden pelargoniums and salvias. I love silver leaved plants that are hardy to dry areas and love to combine them with pink, purple and white flowers in spring. I love pastels and try to keep to colour schemes, but my garden turns out to be bright and multi-coloured anyway and I don’t mind one bit! My garden is my happy place!

I started the garden more or less from scratch. I fill in all the gaps in my garden with plants so the weeds don’t get a chance!

I know that you have a lot of roses, please tell us more about those.

I love roses and grow quite a few varieties; I have re-planted a new rose garden around the house area. My favourites are old fashioned vintage roses with romantic names and big blowsy blooms. Some of my earliest ones are from the 1790s, but most of the oldies are from the Victorian era and I have a particular love for Hybrid Perpetuals, Bourbons, Chinas, Old Teas, and Hybrid Musks. I love how hardy they are, how they don’t need much pruning, and have huge deeply fragrant blooms. I also like to grow hardy modern shrub roses that are in the old form like David Austins or other modern roses from the Kordes family.

What’s the biggest challenge gardening where you live?

Our hardest gardening issue is the heat and dry in summer. January and February are the hardest months because of the high water evaporation rate, which extends in the autumn months. These months increase the evaporation rate tremendously so that 60 per cent of what you water in the garden in these months evaporates off. Things get easier to garden in autumn, while it still can be dry, the days are not as hot and the water actually benefits the plants and they put on new growth from there.

The garden flowers profusely when it rains so from the start of the rains in say late autumn and when the day temperatures cool down a little, the flowers come back en-masse from May to December; late autumn to Summer we have continuous flowers. Then it has a brief respite, with less flowers in January and February in the high summer when it is quite hot and dry.

Beautiful bearded irises in October

Also sadly it is quite an environmentally degraded area. I live in typical sheep and grain farming country. This particular area was stripped of almost every, last tree, shrub and groundcover by over judicious clearing and cutting down trees to make a crust (sold for firewood to the local copper mines) in the 1890s when there was a drought for farmers. So this degraded and sullied land has given me a unique insight into the problems regarding bringing the land and the wildlife back from the brink of extinction.

I have planted lots of native trees and shrubs on my small acreage to bring back some of the balance of nature. To provide a wildlife corridor for visiting birds, butterflies and kangaroos etc. Also to stop wind and water erosion of the precious yet thin top-soils typical in Australia.

As a painter too, I use my flowers as my paint palette.

What is the most rewarding thing about your garden?

I like to garden a little most days of the year and do a few hours of gardening every day, I do it in between blocks of writing. My garden informs my writing and is a partnership between me and my garden. Going out in nature clears the mind, opens you up to your spiritual guidance, and clears away stress. It is a therapeutic thing to do.

I am a bit of a collector of plants and like to collect pretty Mediterranean climate cottage perennials and sub-shrubs. I love all kinds of felicias, pelargoniums, salvias, Marguerite dairies, euryops daisies, ostespermums, arctotis etc. Pretty flowering Australian natives particularly ones with icy grey foliage and pretty mauve or purple blooms.

My favourite thing to do in my garden is to potter about in it! A little unrestricted garden pottering is a healing balm to the noise and hustle of everyday modern life. I love how nature has a way of rewarding you for every single effort and is so generous with us. I love working on my garden, it’s like a three-dimensional work of art that you can interact with, smell, touch and taste.

Doesn’t Sarah’s garden sound wonderful!

Sarah blogs here RoseGardenConversations

Also follower her on:

Twitter here @SarahRajkotwala

Instagram here @sarahrajkotwala_writer

Please join me in thanking Sarah for taking time to answer my questions and providing photos for this post.

Catch up with our visit to Fred’s Normandy garden here.