garden update

I keep meaning to post updates on it more frequently but it's difficult to photograph because it's big enough that you either shoot close enough to get detail but it lacks perspective of where it is in relation to everything else or you shoot wide and miss all detail.
Partial shot of the front, anglign towars the left. All trees are now undercut, deadwood removed, shaped and thinned etc. Three trees (out of 60 some) still need crown-work and a bit of handsaw pruning to remove bits where they keep suckering but by and large they're done. You'll also notice all the overgrown shrubs between the small rhododendron in front of the house (where the white pots are) and the big one to the upper left have had a VERY hard prune - from 1-1.5m of leggy and the valencia orange just to the left of the small rhododendron (almost touching in the pic) has had a good bit of restoration after the previous owners went at it (literally) with a chainsaw and left it pretty badly off. It's hard to see in this shot but the edges of the beds have started being dug in. Oh and the two black blips in the lower right corner with a silver blip between are chooks at a feeder. LOL

You can see the edge dug in better here, and appreciate how hard the shrubs were pruned - they were almost as tall as the valencia orange tree on the right side of the picture!

Rhododendron path showing all the trees now free of deadwood and suckers. These trunks couldn't even be seen for all the years worth of deadwood surrounding them. They were solid thickets from the ground up to the underside of their crowns.

In the previous picture this is the tree at the far right foreground corner just above Cami.

If you remember, they all looked like the below picture to start! To give an idea of the work, each one is as tall as the house or a bit taller and climbing in them requires a bit of acrobatics. ;-) The deadwood has to be removed, suckers removed with handsaw just below where the woods DNA makes them keep suckering, unsightly or rotten limbs removed and under-cut so you can work under them.

"I didn't touch it mum, honest!" I was putting together bean-poles with bamboo stakes and twine and kept coming up with the twine-ball missing courtesy of someone thinking it a fine toy! She's laying on it here, you can barely see it poking out from under her as she practices her best "sweet, innocent puppy who never touched the twine" look. ;-)