Garden Projects - Part 2

Saturday, 8 July 2017

The other project I worked on this week is the Secret Zen Garden, outside the Green/Oslo room. Until this week it was a dead triangle of space under the deck with just the air conditioner outlet, a dead man-fern, and an overgrown NZ Flax bush.  The NZ flax had grown so large it was actually pushing the retaining wall apart so it took a few hours of hard work & sweat to remove it (and yet another trip to the tip), but it eventually surrendered. 

I cleared up the rest of the area then used some scrap wood and collected river rocks to create a small zen feature.  It didn’t look all that ‘zen’ though with the air conditioner unit right behind it, so I bought some cheap pine (thankfully only $1.87 per metre since I confused my calculations and bought twice as much as I needed) and built a screen which I am pretty happy with.  

in progress - air conditioner screen and feature done.. 

The other thing that needed screening was the bottom half of a doorway which is a leftover oddity from when we extended the deck. The half of the door above the deck is covered by a blackboard, which has left the bottom half a metre off the ground (including a cat-door for athletically talented cats). As I had leftover pine (clever me!) and some other wood scraps, I made a cover for that which I think looks cool and is a nice contrast to all the horizontal lines of the air-conditioner screen. 

The last job to do was to get some nice pebbles to fill in the rest of the space.  I could only put a tiny plant in the very corner of the garden as that’s the only section which gets wet when it rains (that’s where the flax grew).  

The rock pile on the stump covers up some pvc plumbing, and I found the horse shoe in another section of the garden. 

Overall I’m really happy with it - particularly the two screens - it’s so much nicer than what was there (sorry - again no proper ‘before’ photo!).