The African Garden

Firstly, let me apologise for not publishing in December.

Since August 2003, I have been quite unwell, as I discovered then that I had Prostate Cancer and would have to have radiotherapy treatment for it. I had not been well for quite a period before this but I was to get worse.

This has decidedly stopped me from working and at present I am in a forced retirement from the real world and work. However, I hope to be back into full swing in 2004, God willing it, of course.

The radiotherapy treatment has been quite horrific with the side effects really pulling me down and making me so ill I have not been able to do much anything worthwhile since the treatment started.

Now, I 'm not looking for sympathy; there are a lot of cancer sufferers much more worse off than I am and sometimes I felt like an impostor with some of the comrades at the hospital suffering much worse symptoms than I, especially the ones having chemotherapy.

THE AFRICAN GARDEN.

I have in previous articles mentioned that I have not had the ability to look out for my plants last year as well as I wished to but since finishing the treatment I have been able to work on my idea for an African Garden for my home in Gippsland. This has come about, partly because a lot of my plants were left to brave the elements here and did so quite well. I decided that they may as well be in the ground to do this, rather than in pots.

I also had many small plants in pots that I knew would benefit from being in the ground, so I set about establishing my African Garden with many of the plants I had grown from seed. Many of them are commonly grown in many gardens; I had a few I was not sure about - but - what the heck! Let's give it a go, I thought.

The area I chose was quite a barren area when I started. I t was also a very difficult piece to plant due to the narrowness of parts of it and it also had a deep slope on part of it. I started off by putting Kniphofia species on the top of the slope and I had to put a wire frame in front of them to stop the soil from washing away. Once this difficult job was done I proceeded to plant the other sections. Across one area I have planted a long row of Crinum Moorei which is now doing quite well and multiplying fast. I had some trouble with insects decimating the leaves but I soon fixed that problem with a Garlic spray. I n front of this I got brave and put a circle of Boophane disticha which were quite healthy in the pots but have tripled in size since planting them out. They survived our winter frosts very well.

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