Monthly Notes for Highveld Gardeners

cliveas!

One of the things that sealed the deal for my choosing Valley Lodge as our Home Sweet South African Home was the established garden on the property. Helen, the owner of the property, is a gardener and she and Clement, the gardener who came with the garden, built the garden themselves from scratch. Clement and I are going to be very good friends. I intend to stick to him like glue as he prunes and trims, feeds and waters, digs and tops off the garden.

brugmansia!

I am a gardener myself having learned much of it while I was a member of a Garden Club of America club in New Jersey for 10 years. I also took classes at the New York Botanical Garden, Duke Gardens, the New York Horticultural Society, Reeves Reed Arboretum - where I worked for a while as an event planner -  along with many other botanical gardens and horticultural societies and clubs.

I had gardens of my own growing flowers, trees, water plants, herbs, and vegetables on my little acre in Fanwood and my summer house at the Jersey shore with the help of wardian cases, a heated greenhouse, an English conservatory, an iron compost bin, and a cold frame. I was not a very good gardener, but I tried really, really hard!!!

As it turns out I grew many native South African plants in NJ. (I had a greenhouse and a conservatory, remember?) I realized this as I was finding good homes for my plants before I left. I researched care instructions on some of the plants for the adoptive parents to refer to after I was gone. Blood lilies, veltheimia bracteata, jade plants, some geraniums and aloes, succulents, clivias ... all native to South Africa. So I was delighted when I found them  ... and one of my favorite non-natives, brugmansia  ... all blooming in my garden at Valley Lodge after I arrived. And as an added bonus, they were all planted in the ground and not in containers as they were in NJ where I would have to haul them in and out of shelter as the seasons changed! Awesome!

My neighbor Daphne recommended I go visit the Montrose Nursery nearby to survey the plants available and establish a friendly rapport. Good advice! It was there I found a copy of Monthly Notes for Highveld Gardeners, the full color almanac recently published by the Johannesburg Garden Club. It will be my gardening bible over the next year!

the right place for a lime tree!

The first thing I added to our garden is a lime tree. There was one on the complex property but it was planted in the wrong place. Behind a wall under very large trees in full shade. It hardly got any sun. It had a few limes on it which was pretty amazing really when you considered its location. It so badly wanted to fruit!

I had the perfect spot for it in my garden in front of a brick wall which would provide some nice radiant heat in practically full sun all day. I bought some compost and fertilizer from the nursery and Clement and Bob, one of the resident landscapers for the complex, dug a hole in front of the wall and transplanted it for me.
In the ground!

Now I grew citrus plants in NJ, mandarin orange, meyer lemon, key lime and blood orange, but they were in pots and spent most of the year in the greenhouse. They only came out after the threat of frost subsided in May and before the frost threatened again in September. Now I would try my hand on citrus. In the ground! What a concept.  (There is already a resident lemon tree that is in full fruit!)

lemons!

lime!

Helen is very glad that she has someone living at Valley Lodge who cares about the garden and I am happy to have a garden to care for - and Clement! I cannot wait until the Johannesburg Garden Club's annual plant sale in September to find more South African plants to add to it. I want to be a Highveld gardener!