Savannah Garden Diary

Gardening Gone Wild has a Design Workshop on fences and walls (which is an excellent idea), so I’ll chip in with my most recent fence.

This is the entrance to the service area and vegetable garden. The mess in that corner of the garden is past praying for, what with compost piles, our johnboat, Richard’s dinghy, and piles of lumber from tearing out the deck. So I decided to screen it off with a fence, made largely from timbers recycled from the deck.

I also needed somewhere to put the dragon fountain Richard gave me, which is not really designed for the great outdoors, being made of plywood with a coating of fiberglass. But I had to rescue it because he commissioned it specially and I have developed a fondness for that foolish head. I made some repairs to the top half, which seemed rescueable. It was obviously not going to last long if exposed to the elements, so I decided a roofed gateway would give it a bit of protection.

The red paint was to give the gateway a vaguely Chinese look that would make the dragon feel at home. The pond beneath the dragon looks all right in this photo, but it has not proved a success. I am going to have to rethink that.

This photo was also taken before the Clematis armandii on the right died. That’s the second one that has died in the same position. I don’t know why. I put them there because they do so well in England that I assumed they liked it wet, and that is the vegetable garden, so it gets plenty of water. Tom has a lovely one just a few blocks from here, so it’s not that you can’t grow them in Savannah. I think I will just conclude that armandii is not for me, and give up on it.