The Beginning

We moved into our little hill cottage in the Dandenongs on 30th October 2009 and loved it instantly!

The street seems to have originally been created in the 1920s, though we're not sure yet exactly when.  We do know that there was a dairy farm run pretty much where we are in the 1920s, so we're assuming it was in the latter part of the decade.  Our actual lot was part of a larger one when first sold off and later subdivided.  It is possible our actual property was built circa 1955, as this is when it was first rated.  There are no records for our property prior to that and these were perhaps lost in a bushfire.

A quick tour of the property when we first moved in:

The front of the house, facing the street.

The Front Gums.  From left to right, a peppermint hybrid, a Eucalyptus obliqua and a Eucalyptus radiata (a narrow leaved peppermint).  Under the E. radiata, we had a mirrorbush (Coprosma repens - now removed) and also a hairpin Banksia (Banksia spinulosa).  On the nature strip, you can see a Black Wattle (Acacia mearnsii) between the gums, which later came down in a storm.

The driveway is fairly steep, though not as bad as many in the area.  Some bright spark laid bricks here, on the patio and the path...  deadly when wet, especially with gum leaves on them!  To the left there we have a Melaleuca sp., Acanthus mollis (mostly now removed in an attempt at keeping it under control and  because the cat house will be there), a Camellia sp., then another Melaleuca sp.  It's a bit hard to see, but there is a fence at the bottom there covered in English Ivy and Wandering Trad.  When we cleared that area, the fence was totally rotten and was removed.  Strangely, we also discovered several railway lines!

  To the right you can see a tree, which is Ceratopetalum gummiferum (NSW Christmas Bush / Tree), a smaller tree which appears to be an ornamental cherry of some type and all the way down the bed are Agapanthus.  These guys are really invasive here and as a result we've worked hard to remove them.  We're over 2 years in now and still battling them.  Ours have all been dug out, but the neighbours all have them and they keep seeding in our garden.  I pulled an entire bucket of tiny baby aggies out from a 1m sq area at the bottom left the other week.  Horrible things with roots like freaky alien ganglions that want to attach to your face and suck your brain out your nostrils - don't plant them!

When we viewed the house, which was in late Autumn (approx April I think), we'd been really pleased that there was this paved area at the back of the house to sit.  It looks great in this picture, even though it's unkempt and overgrown.  What you can just make out, behind and to the right of the covered BBQ, is an old washhouse which was used as storage.  It was totally covered in potato vine (I believe Soluanum laxum, otherwise known as Jasmine Nightshade), but that whole thing has now been removed.  I'll post a blog about that area later :)

Random fenced area... The previous owners' toddler played in this area and we used it for the same purpose for a short while, having christened it "the pig pen".  It turned out that it's been there for several owners, having originally been a dingo enclosure!  We now have veg beds in there and I dug up several dog bones (by that I mean bones from dogs, not bones dogs have eaten), so not sure I want to know what happened to the previous owners' dogs!


There will be another post about the veggie beds later :)

This we believe is also a E. obliqua, but doesn't fit all the requirements perfectly so we could be wrong!  They do hybridise readily though.  You can see someone has done some very unsympathetic pruning.  :(  The yellow bush you can see is actually a broom species, not a native one, and has since been hacked out.  We also found several others and winged elms (Ulmus alata - also known as Wahoo trees!), which we believe to have been suckers off a tree that the neighbours to the left there took down a few years ago.  Winged elms are very uncommon here, but they're really struggling from elm leaf beetle, being out competed by the huge gum and also are growing quite literally through the fence, so have mostly been removed.


Well, except for the ones that keep suckering up through the grass and have to be lawnmowed to keep them under control!

This overgrown area was to the rear left, as you face out from the house.  We'd no idea what half the stuff was when we moved in, except for potato vine, but this area has now been cleared.  More about that when we go look at the fate of the wash house!

Here we have the back left corner of the garden.  We've used that rickety old bench to sit on and the view is pretty nice, but as you can see the potato vine and wandering trad, which is an invasive weed here, (Tradescantia fluminensis) were competing for space.  This area has now been completely cleared and, after a 2 year battle, is now free of wandering trad (fingers crossed!). 

Poor picture due to the fence on the pig pen getting in the way, but this is all we could see of the rear of the garage.  It's actually a decent sized area of around 3 x 5m and is now part way to becoming the girls' play area.  Well, one of their play areas!

As you can see, there's a sprawling fig here which is completely shading out a lemon tree someone was silly enough to plant here.  The area is overgrown with English Ivy (Hedera helix), which is another weed, so we concentrated on clearing that first and also severely cut back the fig (which regrew by the next year!).  The lemon had a good prune too in the hope of rejuvenating it, but no luck so it and the fig will be coming out completely.  When we cleared this area, we discovered it was full of wild strawberries and English violets (Viola odorata).  The violets are on the potential threat environmental weed list, but they provide great ground cover and smell lovely, so I'm happy to live with them :)

The View


I don't think I need to say anymore about that really, do I? :)