My Home: Planting our Poolside Garden

So last week I wrote about my inspiration for my poolside garden, you can read about it here.

Our existing garden surrounding the pool was full of pebbles, sand, some farmers friends weeds, palm trees and a bit of this & that! It was the last garden we had left to makeover and I had been putting it off, as I wasn't sure if we were going to spend the money to do a massive reno on the pool area, or do it DIY on a budget and give it a facelift. We opted for the facelift option. If we were going to spend the big bucks the idea was to remove the rock retaining walls above the pool, as well as the garden and put a Balinese styled pool cabana in...to look a little like this...

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However, in any renovation you have to think about the cost and would you make this money back in resale? For me, the cost outweighed the benefit. So it was now time to do a bit of DIY gardening, garden bed building and next step, paving around the pool area. This is what it looked like when we bought the house. Lots of palm frongs, weeds and no appeal.

 

We had some trees lopped, pressure cleaned the paths and rock and painted the retaining rock wall.

We then built timber garden beds alongside the house, where a pointless path was. The aim of this was to bring some greenery and life into the pool area, as there was a lot of concrete and brick initially.



It took two ute loads of soil to fill the garden beds and existing garden. Seriously, who needs a gym membership when you are doing this sort of lifting work all the time? :P

Then came the trip to my favourite nursery, Plant Mart at Mudgeeraba. We could have spent hours there, all the spring stock just looked so healthy and there was so much variety to choose from. We choose a variety of cordylines, bromeliads, jade plants, black mono grass, agapanthas, bird nest ferns...ahhh I could have bought so much more!
Here is the finished product... 

 

And just when I took my 'after' photos and called it a day, I go outside to hear Nathan sawing away and find that he has added a timber length to the top of the garden bed as an edging. So now the timber topped needs to be oiled and the project is done. It is never ending!! :)

I think the topped edging looks great though and really finishes it off, do you agree?

Leave a comment below and let me know what you think of the transformation so far :)

Xx Ashlea