All Things Lovely

Serious Garden Envy

Happy Monday!

I've been spending some time on my new favourite home inspiration website, House To Home. If you need some decorating inspiration, spend a few minutes or hours on there!

What especially grabbed my attention were the beautiful gardens. So peaceful and relaxing. I'm still trying to get my garden up to scratch, it's so hot in Sydney in the summer that all the plants that are looking lovely in autumn and spring wither up and die come summer. So, here's some garden eye candy for you all.

 

 

 

 

 

Romeo + Juliet

Happy Tuesday! This week is already flying by. I had a lovely weekend, I hope you did too. I spent Sunday afternoon up in Leura, one of my favourite places in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales. We were fortunate enough to go to a moonlight performance of Romeo & Juliet in the Leura Everglades Gardens, it was just beautiful.

The gardens are just stunning, it was lovely just to wander around before the show. I wish my gardens could look like this!

 

 

Isn't it all just lovely? The Leura Shakespeare Festival is on until this weekend, if you can, head along! 

Yes, it's Pink!

I've been wanting to do this for quite a while, but finally got the time to do it. Paint my outdoor setting. I bought it about a year ago, but it's been bashed around a fair bit outside, and started to look pretty dodgy. Inspired by Nicole at Making It Lovely, I took the plunge and painted it.

Here's the dreadful before so you can see what I was working with!

I decided to use Wattyl Solagard to paint it, they have a fair few colours, but I chose Fig Sweet.

And here you go! Yes, it's prety bright. I think I'm happy with it, but I'm happy to incorporate some charcoal into my garden to kind of tone it down a bit.

 

Backyard Climbers

Spring has totally sprung here in Sydney. The weather is warm and beautiful, and all the wisteria, cherry blossoms, roses and everything else is out. Driving to work now is such a delight as I pass so many beautiful homes with beautiful blooming gardens!

It's got me thinking about my own backyard which sadly has not had much attention over winter. The best thing that has happened is the neighbours behind me have cut down a dreadfully ugly cactus plant they had. I can handle it's ugliness, but when it was flowering, the flowers would fall on my lawn and in my garden and rot away if I didn't get out quick enough to pick them up. See it in the back corner? Ugly, hey?

Anyway, now that it's gone the backyard is really open and I can see about 5 houses down the street. My new plan is to build a screen and have a beautiful flowering climber do it's thing. The first plant on my shortlist is wisteria... it just is so beautiful to me.

Image from Flickr; Neosnaps

My other thought was jasmine. I would love to walk outside and just have that beautiful fragrance in the air!

Has anyone grown either and got any tips or recommendations for me? I'm not a good gardener, so I need to know if it's easy to kill as well!

Sitting In The Sunshine

It is a beautiful autumn day here in Sydney today, perhaps a little windy but the sun is shining, butterflies are flitting around and it's just one of those days where you can waste it all just sitting out in the garden reading a good book.

This is my outdoor area, I bought this little table and chairs about six months ago. Unfortunately I don't have a covered area so my little table and chairs are out in the elements. We had an incredibly hot summer and so that combined with rain, the wood is really suffering.

I think I've now come up with a solution! I saw Nicole's gorgeous new porch, and table setting she created for the BHG 48-Hour challenge and I think I'm now convinced they should be painted in a beautiful little colour. What started out as a fairly normal setting is just amazing!

Images from Making It Lovely

What do you think? And the biggest question, what colour will I paint it?!I'm leaning towards pink... or maybe the pretty green.

It's A Harsh Summer

I want to cry. This is my beautiful lush green grass at the moment. Sydney (most of Australia actually) is going through a massive heatwave at the moment. It's been about 40 degrees out here (over 100 for those in fahrenheit) every day and so my poor little garden is really suffering. Add to that we're on fairly tight water restrictions from the drought so I can only water twice a week.

Some of my camellias have really suffered, this one is not too bad, so you can imagine the sad sight some of the others are. I'm really hoping with as much water as possible, plus hopefully some cooler weather in a week or two they might come back to life. At least my roses are loving it!

My Backyard Got A Haircut

After only about 7 months, I've finally been able to mow my new lawn! I returfed over the Easter weekend, and since we then went through winter, it's only now that it's really needed to be mown. I was terribly excited (can you tell I've not done this before?) As you can, it was getting a bit desperate.

Given that it's such a small patch of grass, I just bought a little push manual mower, which then had to be put together. Fortunately Dad was able to help with that, or I would be screwed.

Indiana of course was a huge help.

So, we finally got it together and got the lawn mowed. I'm telling you, it was harder than it looks. I'm hoping next time with less grass it's heaps easier.

And after. The edges still need doing, but I need to borrow an edger and then it will be beautiful. Cricket fans will know what I mean when I say I want to make it look like the MCG for the Boxing Day test.... just once!

Beyond Excitement

Remember the roses I planted recently? Well, I was unable to find one of them as a bare rooted rose, so I was given a 2 year old version of it. It's a David Austin rose named Grace. This is a really special rose to me, as I wanted to plant it to remember someone who I loved and isn't with me anymore.

I only planted it 10 days ago, and yesterday I went and had a look and this is what I was blessed with.

 

Isn't it just exquisite? The fragrance is delightful as well. I am so excited that I'm actually managing to grow something!

More Outdoor Settings

I'm really trying to narrow this down! I really don't feel like traipsing to a million shops, so I researched online and these are the outdoor settings in my price range and the size I need. Not yet tested for comfort, so I should probably do that soon. What do you think? I'm leaning towards one and five at the moment, although I have actually tried out number four and it was pretty comfy. I keep changing my mind all the time about what I want out the back.

1. Outdoor Furniture Specialists  2. Barbeques Galore  3. Bunnings  4. Bunnings  5. Jamie Durie for Big W  6. Homemakers Australia

Outdoor Living

We're now about half way through Spring here in Australia, and it's high time I started thinking about my outdoor space. I've really only gotten around to actually doing something about my backyard this year, so this summer I'm hoping to enjoy the spoils of that hard work.

I don't yet have a table and chairs for outside, and the space is so small I really could only fit a bistro setting out there without it looking ridiculous. I've started my searching and have found something like what's below. Then I thought, how could I jazz it all up. This is a little something I came up with, bearing in mind I probably won't do any of it!

Starting with a small table and chairs from Bunnings, I then thought about placing some decking tiles down over my existing pavers. The planter pot is also from Freedom, with a gorgeous birdcage pillow from Anthropologie. Some cute bird plates, and a hanging lantern complete the look.

Backyard Progress

My backyard is slowly coming along. Now that spring is here I'm hoping that it all starts exploding with growth! My new roses arrived last week, and since they arrived at a bad time in the week, my gorgeous parents came over and did a Backyard Blitz for me! How lovely it was to come home and see the roses planted and all the weeds gone, they truly are the best.

You can't really see the roses that clearly, they are literally just sticks in the ground planted in front of the camellias. I still need to get one more which was unfortunately out of stock as a bare rooted rose, so I'll wait to find it as a slightly advanced plant. There is also a gap right in the middle for a statue I'm planning to buy, if I can find it!

Hopefully over the coming weeks with some sun, water and lots of loving they will start to bud and I'll have beautiful flowers! I can't wait. Oh, and can you believe my grass is still alive! I seriously can't.

Spring Has Sprung

I love Spring, I should say I heart Spring! The flowers and beautiful smells come out, and life is good once again. Unfortunately the weather here in Sydney is cold and wet, but hopefully it's not going to last long.

So, it's time to do some more to my garden. I adore roses, my parents have always had a stunning rose gardem which my Dad in particular tends with a lot of love and care. In my own home I am hoping to achieve even half of that beauty.

Some of my favourite roses are David Austin roses, their 'old fashioned' style, beauty and fragrance makes me smile. I have just ordered six of them, so hopefully they arrive soon and I can plant them.

From left to right: Scepter’d Isle, The Endeavour, The Mayflower, Comtes de Champagne, Kathryn Morley, Grace