Tagged again: "Front Door, Back Door" Meme

Lovely Kate from Our Red House has tagged me for the "Front Door, Back Door" meme, which asks you to post photos of the view from your front door and back door.

Ever the yard-voyeur, I love to look at pics of other blogger's gardens, so it would be remiss of me not to post some photos of my own ;-)

The first pic is looking directly out our front door, which is angled in relation to the street. In front is a gorgeous tri-colour frangipani, and you can just see the edge of one of my new apple trees which are in pots along the front of my house.



If you look to the left, towards the street, you can see our front path and the garden bed by the front door, beside the garage. I never remember to water out there, and it's in the rainshadow of the eaves of the house, so, apart from one dwarf Gardenia right near the door, I have planted it out with succulents, such as echeverias, sanserveria (Mother In Law's Tongue), agaves, yuccas, draceanas and Purple Heart (Tradescantia).

Another succulent, the Jade Plant, is in a pot to the right of the front door - it's supposed to bring good luck (well "wealth" actually, but I regard "wealth" in terms of good fortune rather than money).

Like Kate, I have two back doors; one from the laundry, and one which opens onto a covered area, and leads to the backyard proper. We actually have a "sideyard" rather than a backyard, LOL, as our house is set 2 metres off the back and side boundaries on the other two sides (we did this deliberately to give us the maximum useable area to enjoy the sunny, northern aspect).

The laundry door therefore opens directly onto a side fence - very unnattractive. If you step out however, and look right, you will see this marginally less unnattractive view at the moment:

It's on the shaded, southern side of the house, hence the moss growing on the retaining wall. I've just cut back the canna lillies for winter (you would normally do this at the end of winter, but we don't get frosts so I just cut them back when they look ratty after flowering). For the rest of the year, it normally looks like this:



Stepping out of the other back door, into the pergola area, you see this view, looking through the new still-unfinished grape arbour (that's Miss 4 waving at the camera from the trampoline) to the north:

It looks to me, like the aftermath of a cyclone at the moment because until two days ago, it looked like this:

It's council greenwaste collection again this week, so DH chopped out more of the huge Giant Bird of Paradise (Strelizia) in the middle over the weekend. There are still two huge 6 metre high branches left to chop out, but we need help with those as they are hanging over the neighbour's bird aviaries. While it was a lovely plant - and it blocked the ugly view of the neighbours' roofs! - we (meaning I) want to replace it with banana and paw paw trees. They will grow up again to block the view, will be attractive tropical-looking plants in their own right, and will also (hopefully) bear fruit. Yum.

If you look to the left you see this (don't you love how dogs always have to get in the shot?):

Behind the grape vine, tiny dwarf lime, mature dwarf lemon tree and herbs in the foreground is a retaining wall, and below that, out of sight, are my small vegie beds and the moved-three-times-so-far clothesline. The path leads further left past the slimline rainwater tank and more citrus trees, to two compost bins and more vegetables and trees in pots. Dwarf apples and dwarf pears, spinach and more herbs in pots are out of shot immediately to the left.

If you look to the right you'll see this:

In front is my other grape vine on the left, and the Chinese water chesnut bowl on the right (with potted fruit trees behind it: mango, sapote, two avocadoes and a dwarf mandarine). If you look really closely you'll see the stick-like form of a young deciduous dwarf black mulberry tree in the middle of the frame, on top of the retaining wall. Behind it is a Gardenia (which is being removed next spring to make more room for the mulberry and starfruit), and behind that, is one of my young starfruit (Carambola) trees. The big palms in the rear are along the back fence and block the view to my less-than-neighbourly neighbours, so they won't be coming out any time soon! The path leads past my potted blueberry hedge to the right, to a small garden shed and around to my worm farm, mini-greenhouse and coffee tree hedge along the back fence.

I hope you enjoyed the mini-tour! Now I'm off to peruse everyone else's garden pics :-)