garden planning

 
Sorry, sorry. I sent a brief e-mail because I didn't want to tie up too much space. May I try again?
 
I am trying to garden/landscape approximately 5 acres near the house and restore/rehabilitate a larger property. Under aboriginal stewardship this was woodland with a large range of perennials but few shrubs. Archeological evidence in charcoal deposits suggests that there was once a denser coverage of trees and more shrub species.
 
The soil is now hard clay withpockets of iron-stone gravel shot. It is slightly acid, and there are two small, but worrying, areas of salting on the larger property.
 
There is constant wind - 300 days a year - sufficient for us to generate all our electrical needs with some left over. The winds are bitterly cold in winter and those from the north are dessicating in summer. Temperatures ranged from -10C to 48C last year. Those are official figures and I suspect the range is somewhat greater here because of the exposure. We can have several degrees of frost into mid summer.
 
When we first moved here there was a regular rainfall and a small watercourse through the property. There has been no reliable rainfall for years and a dry creek bed.
 
When we moved there were only 2 trees and lots of non-native grasses. We decided that our first task was to establish windbreaks. With help from locals, the Department of Agriculture, and what ever information we could find in books and magazines we drew up a list of plants that were local or supposed to survive our conditions. We sourced 5000 trees and shrubs locally raised and trained to the climate. We followed the advice to plant after the Autumn break and to plant small seedling plants or tube stock. The plants were carefully planted to get any avialable moisture, given wind protection and watered once a week for three weeks. Then we experienced the wettest winter on record and many trees drowned. The following summer was the, then, hottest on record and it didn't rain for over a year. The creek dried up and the rest of the trees died as they had no roots.
 
I have experiemented with planting at various times of the year. After the autumn break still seems the best but we have had many years when there is no autumn break. Some years spring planting seems more successful. We usually dig our holes one day and fill them with water. We prepare the seedling trees by soaking them for about an hour before planting; they are planted in the soaked holes, given water and some wind protection. They get little extra water as we rarely have it, but we try to give some in spring if it has been dry and some early summer. The only change we have made to our planting process over the years is to add mulch around trees as we plant.
 
After our first mass planting debarcle a friend gave us some melalucas - not local plants - and some ceonathus, and we planted a small windbreak near the house with these plants. They were never watered - we were very low - and all survived. 
 
I began to take seed and cuttings from these plants and expanded this to collecting seed and cuttings from from bush plants and from mature plants in local gardens. However, I use both local nurseries and other sources of plants such as members of garden clubs and specialist growers of native plants. I do have quite a bit of success with this process - 60-90%. At the same time as I began growing seedlings we began a trial ground of plants we thought might survive - after much research into plants from here and around the world. This news group is one source of this information. We have found that this trial ground is of limited use as plants that do well in one place will die if planted only a few metres away. We have had great success with Correa alba in some spots, and thought it a winner, until a recent planting was our usual success rate.
 
When we had a success with the small melaluca windbreak we tried to extend this both sides with clones, seedlings and related plants. 30% survived. All subsequent plantings - with the exception of 'disaster' plantings - have roughly the same survival rate. Disasters include 1 flash flood down the creek wiping out 1000 plants, 1 mouse plague - they really eat anything and everything, 2 fires, 3 locust infestations and, shortly after one mass planting, a mob of kangeroos, not seen in the open in living memory, went through us to the bush 15K away. We have been enduring 12 years of drought which has brought many parrots down from the north to us and, while they usually only tip prune plants, they can  occasionally take to a whole tree and wreck destruction. The hares I have learned to live with.
 
After our result with the second windbreak, we 'plugged the holes' with whatever was available - wormwood, rosemary, correas, blackwoods. The result is a visual mess.
 
I given up and taken up this project several times. This year I have lost an adenothus hedge, an entire collection of eremophilias that has taken so long to gather I can't remember exactly when I started, and have taken no cuttings and started no seedlings.
 
I would like to have some wind protection without putting an expensive 6ft fence around the entire space - although we have enclosed some areas for vegetables and fruit. I would like to have some sun protection, and I would like to be able to start doing the sort of garden planning that begins with the questions of where do we want access, paths, and so on. My first question is always how many of these plants, labouriously gathererd and planted, will survive? My lack of skill and foresight has resulted in a garden and landscape  in which what is growing is a visually random collection of survivors. The ceonathus and wormwoods look ugly next to the melalucas. My hedges look like collections of specimens, and plants that do survive do not necessarily have the form that seems suitable for the function I intended.
 
My question remains what do I do? Learn to live with the visual mess, accept it as a sort of 'cottage garden' landscape, or is there some way of getting aesthetic order, gaining that control that is surely the essence of gardening, or at least of garden planning? Do garden professionals really have no disasters from which to recover? How about the fires that seem to have afflicted all mediterranean plants zones in the past few years? How do you decide what to keep of original plans in such situations? Are there some professional tricks to approaching what is left, or what is found to exist when you first see a situation such as that I would present to you?
 
Margaret Healey
Victoria Australia
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