This Garden

After the trauma of leaving my beautiful little garden in Ararat
and before that our Melbourne garden,
- and as we now live in accommodation we don't own (a house belonging to my sister),
I wanted my new garden to be transportable.
I wanted to be able to take it with us when we eventually move into our own home or onto other adventures.
My backyard container garden was born in 2014 and is currently home to 20 or so fruit trees and the same amount of roses, and vegies and flowers.
Container gardening raises a whole new set of challenges.
Our front yard however is a more permanent affair and I planted it out to foster a temperate woodland feel.
As with my previous gardens, this one is a wonderfully engaging creative challenge and I love every minute of it!

The climate in Toowoomba is rather unique in our state.
Queensland is a huge state - approximately 2750km (1700 miles) in length
and about 1800km (1100miles) wide.
That's big, right?
Most of the population is clustered around the Eastern Seaboard and it's tropical -
obviously the higher (north) you go the more tropical it becomes.
Then you have the hot, dry interior - currently in severe drought.
Toowoomba is located on a mountain - about 150km from the coast.
We have quite cold winters (it's all relative - we aren't talking snow) and temperate summers.
We don't suffer from the suffocating humidity that is present along the coast.
So we are able to grow plants including deciduous trees from Europe and Asia.
Plants that don't really grow in the rest of Queensland.
But we are warm enough to grow mangoes and bananas and avocados.
We also have beautifully rich soil - bright reddy orange.